Flambards

Flambards

Cover of first US edition
Author	K. M. Peyton
Illustrator	Victor Ambrus
Cover artist	Victor Ambrus
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Children's novel, pony book
Publisher	Oxford University Press World Publ. Co. (US)
Publication date	September 1967
Media type	Print (hardcover & paperback)
Pages	193 (first edition)
ISBN	(1987)
OCLC	465030
LC Class	PZ7.P4483 Fl
Followed by	The Edge of the Cloud

Flambards is a novel for children or young adults by K. M. Peyton, first published by Oxford University Press in 1967 with illustrations by Victor Ambrus. Alternatively, "Flambards" is the trilogy (1967–1969) or series (1967–1981) named after its first book. The series is set in England just before, during, and after World War I.

The novel Flambards (book one) features a teenage orphan and heiress Christina Parsons, who comes to live at Flambards, the impoverished Essex estate owned by her crippled and tyrannical uncle, William Russell, and his two sons, Mark and Will.

Christina Parsons, who has been shunted around the family since she was orphaned at the age of five years in 1901, is sent to live at Flambards with her mother's half-brother, the crippled Russell. Her Aunt Grace speculates that Russell plans for Christina to marry his son Mark in order to restore Flambards to its former glory using the money that she will inherit on her twenty-first birthday. Mark is as brutish as his father, with a great love for hunting, whereas the younger son William is terrified of horses after a hunting accident and aspires to be an aviator. Christina soon finds friendship with the injured William, who challenges her ideas on class boundaries, as well as her love for horses and hunting. William and Christina eventually fall in love and run away from the hunt ball to London, hoping to marry.

The fourth book controversially reversed the ending of the original trilogy, twelve years later and following the television series.

For The Edge of the Cloud, Peyton won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. She was a commended runner-up for both the first and third books, the latter in competition with her Medal-winning work.

She also won the 1970 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, conferred by The Guardian newspaper and judged by a panel of British children's writers. Ordinarily the prize recognises one fiction book published during the preceding calendar year; exceptionally Peyton won for the Flambards trilogy completed in 1969.