What Are You Looking For?

Expect an imaginative, creature-filled adventure centred on finding sanctuary. Friendship, loyalty, courage and environmental loss sit alongside danger, threatening creatures and occasional insulting language.

A choice-driven story about finding a voice when other people control the decisions. Fred’s move to a new school brings pressure, friendships and opportunities to pursue his art, while each reader’s choices shape a different route.

This is an emotionally attentive story about a child whose secluded woodland life is abruptly disrupted. It explores unfamiliar family relationships, different ways of experiencing the world, and the possibility of connection without requiring October to become someone else.

A child navigating a new life, missing family and friendship encounters a magical garden whose promises lead towards adventure and a darker fairy-tale atmosphere.

This is an imaginative, unsettling quest about two dependent beings trying to build a home rather than achieve isolation. Expect comic absurdity alongside menace, moral complexity and sustained questions about freedom, family and survival.

This is a thoughtful survival adventure in which Roz learns by watching, earns trust through helpfulness and cares for an orphaned gosling. Its accessible episodic structure supports shared reading, while the island’s dangers and losses may prompt pauses.

Expect an eerie, imaginative timeslip story in which Minty investigates a mysterious garden and tries to help two children from different historical periods. Its suspense is closely connected with family distress and compassion.

A child’s perspective makes refugee experience, antisemitism and changing countries personal and discussable. Family solidarity and curiosity sit alongside historically grounded accounts of persecution and loss.

Expect an entertaining ghost adventure with intersecting storylines: kindly ghosts seek a home, while an orphaned heir faces a frightening scheme involving deliberately terrifying spirits.

A warm, strongly moral story about an orphaned girl, changing homes and the relationships she forms. Its emotional centre is the contrast between Heidi’s mountain life and her unhappiness in Frankfurt.

A high-stakes fantasy about two young people facing an oppressive society, dangerous magic and threats to their families. Its strongest focus is courage joined with cultural pride and resistance to injustice.

This is an immersive fantasy adventure in which a rejected boy is drawn into unicorn riding, dangerous magic and a threat to the wider community. Alongside suspense, it explores grief, disappointment, friendship, loyalty and the search for belonging.

Expect a lively, illustrated fantasy quest built around an underdog team. The story combines dungeon challenges, comic world-building and a friendship arc, while Kit’s impulsive decision creates the central problem.