In Selim-Hassan the Seventh, a teenager is determined not to follow in his father's footsteps (but his great-great-great-great grandfather has other ideas). In The Wall, a young nomadic girl is determined to return her grandmother to the land of her birth, across the Great Wall of China.

* Diamond/Band 17 books offer more complex, underlying themes to give opportunities for children to understand causes and points of view.

* Two alternative career paths for Selim-Hasan on pages 54 and 55 help children to discuss the options that Selim-hassan had and the decisions he made.

* Text type: Two stories from other cultures

* Curriculum links: Geography: Passport to the world; Citizenship: Living in a diverse world.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Diamond Series .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 56 pages in this book. This book was published 2008 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Aidan Chambers is an award-winning children's author and an experienced compiler. He worked for some years as a teacher before deciding to write full time. In 1969 he and his wife Nancy founded The Thimble Press, which publishes Signal, a critical journal devoted to children's literature. His book Postcard from No Man's Land won the Carnegie Medal in 1999. He lives in Gloucestershire. Tim Stevens studied illustration at Camberwell College of Art. He illustrated The Girls in the Velvet Frame (Adele Geras) and Down with the Dirty Danes (Gillian Cross) for HarperCollins. He lives in Suffolk. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Vivian French is a well-known author who has written over 150 books for children.