"The school where I first met Cora Ravenwing was called Okington School, and I was just beginning to have real ideas and opinions of my own when I first went there..." With Cora Ravenwing (1980) Gina Wilson began her acclaimed career as a novelist for young adults. As she describes in a new preface to this reissue, the idea for the novel "took a grip" on her such that she wrote without "planning", inspired by the theme of a child"s growing sense of intuition. "A sensitive, mystery-tinged portrayal of social tensions...Cora Ravenwing, village scapegoat, is the first child whom narrator Becky Stokes meets when her family moves outside London in the mid-1950s; and her reflections deftly pick up the undercurrents of gossip, hostility, and social pretension that power the story of their year"s troubled friendship". (Kirkus Review).