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Perfect for fans of Tamora Pierce, Maggie Stiefvater and Cassandra Clare this is a literary fantasy about war, racial identity and first love, in which Frost has left her homeland to travel to the neighbouring country of Ruan in the hope of finding a deity she believes will rid her of a curse. It is a refreshing and provocative real-world take on the fantasy genre: in this world there is no magic and the setting is more akin to Northern India or Tibet than the usual Tolkien-inspired pseudo-Europe. Zoe Marriott's first novel, The Swan Kingdom, was chosen as a USBBY Outstanding International Book. Her third book, Shadows on the Moon, won the prestigious Sasakawa Prize.
A roller coaster adventure following Lee Raven’s terrifying flight through some of the less attractive parts of London – including the sewers! Lee steals a priceless books and somebody is willing to kill him to get it back…Can Lee survive and, can he save the book?
Longlisted for the UKLA 2018 Book Award | Shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2017 and awarded the Amnesty CILIP Honour | Shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize 2016. | A heartfelt, harrowing insight into life as a Rohingya refugee in an Australian detention centre, told through the unforgettable voice of an unforgettable boy. Subhi is one of the Limbo kids in a permanent Australian detention centre, the first to be born in the camp after his Maá and big sister Queeny fled violent persecution in Burma. While he’s only experienced life within the cruel confines of the camp, Subhi’s rich imagination has conjured a magical, solace-giving world in which the Night Sea from his Maá’s tales brings him treasures from his dad. Stories are Subhi’s lifeline. He needs them “to make my memories” and imagines a blanket of stories, a “gigantic blanket big enough to warm everyone”. A new story treasure transforms Subhi’s world in the form of Jimmie, a local girl who finds her way into the camp. She too knows heartache. She’s lost her mum, who used to tell her special tales and gave her a bone sparrow necklace that “carried the souls of all her family”. When Jimmie enters Subhi’s life, he wonders if she’s his guardian angel, though he hadn't expected an angel to have more holes in her clothes than him. And, on meeting Subhi, Jimmie realises that she’s “never had a friend she wanted to share everything with before”, and so she shares her mum’s stories with him, stories he reads to her since she’s unable to read them herself. Subhi's unique voice will weave its way into your heart and under your skin. His descriptions of life in the centre are hauntingly evocative. You feel, for example, the heat of days that get his “skin creeping” and make everything “jangly and loud and scratchy”. Through Subhi, readers experience how it might feel to have no home or voice, and how friendship can lighten the darkest of circumstances. One hopes, as Subhi’s Maá says, that “someday they see we belong.” Both elegant and raw, this is an important and timely novel that bears witness to the risks people take to make their voice heard, and to the resilience of the human spirit.
May 2012 Book of the Month. Matters of life and death and the role of a passionate romance in them lie at the heart of this spellbinding story of how the worlds of the dead and the living cross over and collide. Gottfried Academy is no ordinary school…It’s a place where Latin thrives and the Undead and the living make friends. Renee is a Monitor at the Academy; she can sense death even though she can’t predict it. And she has a vital role to play among the Undead. When Renee meets Dante she knows he is her soulmate. But he is an undead. Will Renee give up her life to save him?
Winner of the German Teen Literature Prize, this is a hugely entertaining hair-raising and tender story of two boys on the road trip of a lifetime. Mike tells the story of the summer that changes his life. With a reputation as the dullest boy in the class his life is changed when new boy Tschick arrives. Tschick doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him; his clothes are scruffy and he frequently arrives smelling of alcohol and clearly drunk. When Tschick turns up in a car in the empty summer holiday and dares Mike to join him Mike throws caution to the wind and steps right in. Underage for driving and with no map and no plan the boys have an extraordinary – and illegal - journey during which they meet some surprising people and some very tricky situations before returning home almost safely and very much changed.
A mouse-eye view of the world: Christopher Mouse describes the many adventures he’s had in his life. It’s simple fare, plainly told and delightfully mousey with it. Like most mice, Christopher has been owned by good and bad children all of whom he views philosophically. He’s had some dramatic escapes and an interesting spell in the museum. It makes fine reading and useful reflection on humans and mice alike.
Roll up, roll up! Shank's Impossible Circus is back in town in this hilariously wacky adventure from bestselling author William Sutcliffe.
One of our Books of the Year 2014 A funny and fast-paced adventure with a brilliant cast of eccentric characters and a great setting in a circus. Adventurous Hannah lives in a very, very dull village with parents who think safety comes before excitement. When she meets Billy Shanks and his not altogether agreeable camel Narcissus she begins an adventure that has all the excitement she needs! Can Hannah and Billy stop the dastardly rogue circus owner before his horrible plan to rob the village can be completed? A circus is a place for all kinds of very clever tricks. David Tazzyman’s illustrations capture the whole perfectly.
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The Austen of audacity, Armitage Shanks, circus master and dastardliest of villains is back and up to no good, to the delight of fans of these wacky, inventive and hugely entertaining books. And indeed, readers are promised (warned?) that this book will be the Shankiest ever written, for there’s not one Shanks centre stage, but two – Armitage we learn has an identically horrible twin, Zachary Shanks. The real hero of the books is of course the thoroughly nice young Billy and it’s more than likely that not only will he be able to see off even two Shanks, but that the effort will be very well worth reading about. Few writers match the frenetic humour and anarchic wit of these stories - they give even Mr Gum a run for his money. Free-wheeling fun! ~ Andrea Reece
Longlisted for the UKLA 2017 Book Award | Set in a near-future version of London, where a drug called Concentr8 has been extensively prescribed to young people diagnosed with ADHD, this is the brilliantly provocative second young adult novel from the bestselling author of Are You Experienced? and New Boy. Against a backdrop of rioting in the capital, a group of socially disaffected friends, led by angry, charismatic Blaze, pull a knife on a man as he leaves work at the Mayor’s office. While the friends wonder why they’ve taken someone hostage, an ambitious journalist investigates whether the withdrawal of Concentr8 might have triggered the rioting. A political scandal unfolds when it emerges that not everyone was medically assessed before being put on the pacifying drug, suggesting that something far more sinister is going on. Told through several authentic first person narratives, and interspersed with revealing excerpts from medical reports, sociological texts and tweets, this gripping, politically-charged novel explores the big issue of how young people get lost and failed by society, and why they might turn to criminal and anti-social behaviour. A fast-paced, thought-provoking rollercoaster of a read.
Set in a frightening future version of London in which the lives of two teenage boys cruelly collide in a divided city, this gripping page-turner has pertinent contemporary resonance, and packs powerful moral and emotional punches. Read it to be thrilled, chilled, and to have your eyes well and truly opened. Teenagers Alan and Lex are on either side of a war policed by drones. Lex lives on The Strip, a bombed-out territory in which the poverty-stricken inhabitants are under constant drone surveillance. “In this city, death seems to perpetually hover nearby, like a needy bully”, Lex remarks, while his dad is part of The Corps resistance movement that’s fighting the bullies, rendering him a top target for the military. On the other side of the divide, fatherless Alan was written off at a young age – “Nobody ever thought I'd amount to anything" - but his talent for gaming has secured him his perfect job as a drone pilot, a role in which he has “absolute power without a single boot on the ground”. But, while he’s proud to protect his country from “terrorists who want to destroy us”, Alan is forced to confront a magnitude of moral dilemmas when he’s tasked with killing a high profile target, who turns out to be Lex’s dad… The dual-narrative device works to great effect as we see both boys wrestling with issues of ethics, family conflict and, in Lex’s case, the overwhelming experience of first love. Ambitious and assured, this keenly plotted thriller also probes deep into the human heart, and comes recommended for fans of Patrick Ness and Malorie Blackman. ~ Joanne Owen
Longlisted for the UKLA Book Awards 2020 | May 2019 Book of the Month | “I am normal. I like being normal”. Such is the mantra of fifteen-year-old Sam. But when he’s uprooted from his Stevenage comp and thrust into the North London Academy for the Gifted and Talented being normal just doesn’t cut it. Simple as. No ifs or buts. To fit in at this “poncey arty farty school” for “Exactly the Kind of People [Sam] Instinctively Hated”, a person needs to stand out. Gel one’s hair in eight directions. Be the offspring of, for example, an Argentinian tango dancer, or a French electro-pop pioneer. The comic characterisation of Sam and his family is as impeccably tuned as a Primrose Hill piano, from his mum’s foray into Hampstead yummy mummy blogger-dom, to his unicorn-obsessed little sister. Sam’s hilariously honest, self-deprecating tone is utterly engaging and put me in mind of an older incarnation of Luke from David Solomons’s fabulously funny Superhero books. Talking of funny, Sam’s turning point turns out to be his talent for comedy (“making people laugh was a thrilling buzz”), and so he finds himself in the unlikely position of performing in the school play. This entertaining romp around pressures to fit in and teenage boy-dom in all its involuntary undercarriage-twitching awkwardness truly shows the diverse talent of its author, whose previous YA novels are every bit as brilliant, but have heavier themes. This is a laugh-out-loud witty wonder of a book.
