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Book 83: Marianne Dreams: Catherine Storr

Marianne is a young girl who is bedridden with a long-term illness. She draws a picture to fill her time, and finds that she spends her dreams within the picture she has drawn. As time goes by, she becomes sicker, and starts to spend more and more time trapped within her fantasy world, and her attempts to make things better by adding to and crossing out things in the drawing make things progressively worse. Her only companion in her dreamworld is a boy called Mark, who is also a long-term invalid in the real world.

Marianne Dreams was first published by Faber and Faber in 1958, and was first printed in paperback by Puffin Books in 1964. It was illustrated with drawings by Marjorie-Ann Watts.