What Are You Looking For?

This is a visually told historical story about a young person treated as an outsider both outside and inside an internment camp. Its strongest offering is a personal route into prejudice, citizenship and belonging.

A tea-centred fantasy of competition, palace intrigue and family devotion. Ning’s search for a cure gives the plot emotional urgency, while brewing, tasting and reading ingredients become ways to investigate danger and negotiate power.

A bilingual picture book presents a young girl whose hand movements imaginatively transform familiar things into a coconut, lake, fish, moon and other discoveries. Short poetic lines sit alongside surreal illustrations, while her parents watch. The book invites shared play with movement, language and the idea that imagination can reshape the world.

A lively fantasy about an ordinary child entering an extraordinary school, balancing comic invention with peril, uncertainty and the discovery of friendship. Its invented gods and visual humour are central attractions.

Choose this for a reader who enjoys high-seas adventure, mermaids, treasure hunts, riddles and brisk action. The story also offers a character-led exploration of identity, friendship, prejudice and belonging.

Expect a brisk, comic swashbuckling story: pirates take Molly, but her courage and cleverness unsettle them. The story’s main pleasure is the reversal of who appears powerful and who needs to be feared.

This offers a lively blend of Ancient Egyptian history, mythology and danger, centred on a young princess who must rely on cleverness while uncertain allies and supernatural forces complicate her task.

This offers a straightforward survival thriller built around a countdown, extremist beliefs and attacks in a familiar city. Its strongest appeal is likely suspense and danger rather than deeply developed character exploration.

This is a long, character-rich coming-of-age novel in which David looks back on fear, labour, friendship and love. Its distinctive interest lies in the gap between what the younger David experiences and what the older narrator understands.

This is a dark, absurd literary novel about an individual facing an authority that refuses explanation. Its unresolved legal nightmare offers sustained material for discussing power, guilt and whether reason can help within an irrational system.

A fast-moving school thriller that turns familiar rules, routines and adult authority into a mechanism of control. Its central tension is whether individuality and independent judgement can survive pressure to comply.

This is a tense, compassionate story about a child taking responsibility in a dangerous society. It combines family survival, Afghan history, women’s restricted freedoms and moments of hope, while leaving Parvana’s immediate future unresolved.

This is a team-centred science-fiction adventure about young people confronting the organisation responsible for transforming one of them. Expect secret missions, superhuman and alien abilities, technology, fights and an urgent threat affecting millions.

A fast-moving environmental dystopian adventure about polluted air, family survival, invention and corporate control. Sparrow and Miriam face a powerful opponent while trying to make clean air available beyond one supplier.

Expect a brisk moral fantasy rather than a cosy animal adventure. The story turns outrage about hunting into comic, threatening reversal, asking readers to feel the consequences from the animals’ perspective.