What Are You Looking For?

A family story about Floss’s choice to live with her father, whose failing café brings financial strain and upheaval. School friendships add another thread, and the ending is open rather than fully settled.

A brief, illustrated introduction to Lincoln’s life, told through selected scenes and free verse rather than a comprehensive biography.

This is a light, episodic school fantasy in which magical animals appear from Ms Plum’s cupboard and become catalysts for pupils’ changing behaviour, confidence, friendships and worries.

This is an action-led animal fantasy about packs facing a looming threat. Lucky’s troubling visions, a traitor, divided loyalties and unexpected allies create a tense story about survival and trust.

This is a comic school story about an overconfident aspiring writer whose contest ambitions meet opposition, embarrassment and competing relationships. Its diary-and-message structure creates a brisk, multi-perspective-feeling reading experience.

Expect an urgent survival adventure in which two children must respond to rising danger after extreme weather separates them from their group. Its environmental focus sits alongside friendship, courage and the pressures of fitting in.

This is a character-led wartime coming-of-age story: relationships and growing up receive sustained attention before and during the conflict. Its view extends beyond the front to family life, nursing and shortages in England.

This is a tender, nature-centred story about a boy’s bond with a seal and his grandfather. Its strongest offering is emotional range: delight in the sea sits alongside physical danger, disappearance, the grandfather’s absence and the passage of generations.

A lively school-and-family story about handling change, friendship and unfair treatment through humour and imagination. Omar’s Muslim identity is part of everyday life, not a separate lesson.

A warm wilderness adventure combines a new family arrangement, practical outdoor activity and animal characters with comic community problems. It offers a gentle route into discussing belonging, cooperation and care for the natural world.

This is a free-verse school story about friendship changing, family crisis and finding a way to express difficult feelings. Nate’s love of reading and writing becomes important as he faces anger, worry and transition.

This is an emotionally serious friendship story rather than a straightforward adventure. Its imagined kingdom, school conflicts and family pressures lead into an unsoftened account of bereavement.

This is a reflective story about losing a familiar home and friendship, then slowly finding steadiness elsewhere. Its poem-by-poem structure gives Diana’s changing feelings room to emerge through observations, notes and everyday family moments.

This is a short, poetic remembrance of a childhood home where prominent Black cultural and political figures gathered. Its words are spare, while the paintings make the people, rooms and atmosphere expansive.

Expect a fast-moving fairy-tale adventure involving illness, magic, strange creatures, rival pursuers and travel through unsettling settings. Red’s fear, friendship with Goldie and changing understanding of others drive the story.

A visually rich biography about how Peter Mark Roget’s love of words and lists developed into the thesaurus. It combines personal history with ideas about language, organisation, medicine, invention and learning.