This is a stunning collection of short stories alternately written by Jill Paton Walsh and Kevin Crossley-Holland. It starts with a story of history as competing narratives, the victor arrogant and secure, showing his mastery. This is a wonderful start to a collection of historical fiction as it alters how the reader reads the rest of the stories in the book, always searching for other perspectives and taking nothing at face value.

This theme of how stories are remembered and told is present throughout the book, the title "Wordhoard" features in Anglo-Saxon literature as something to be unlocked or called upon, a personal treasury of stories and memories. Many of the stories are written as oral tellings, strengthening this sense of oral history making great events and people very personal and human.

I went into this book thinking of oral history as largely a precursor to written history, this showed me how wrong that is. In many ways we are no less a culture of oral histories than the Anglo-Saxons were, every day we tell each other stories and use them to structure our memories of our lives and the people we know. As I was reading this a friend and colleague died, my colleagues and I drew strength and warmth from the sharing of stories and this reminded me how much, particularly on a social and personal level, we still live in an oral storytelling culture.