What Are You Looking For?

A disadvantaged horse moves from failed racing to carriage work, learning about history, reading, languages and different political systems. His later involvement in a crisis gives the story an adventure arc, but the precise resolution is unclear.

This is a comic teen story about friendship, flirting, misunderstandings and the difficulty of managing a situation that keeps expanding. Jess’s plan involving Fred, together with Flora and the visiting French students, contributes to the complications.

Choose this for a reader who enjoys horses, richly imagined landscapes, folklore and a slowly tightening mystery. Its emotional centre is a complicated family whose love and resilience coexist with absence, suspicion and uncertainty.

This is an intimate survival story centred less on action than on two people’s changing relationship, private memories and the difficult work of rebuilding life after catastrophe.

This is an adventure about survival and an unusual cross-generational friendship. Alongside practical danger, it gives substantial space to loneliness, care, learning and the ways a relationship can change someone’s view of the world.

This is an energetic, funny and sometimes unsettling portrait of childhood, told through Paddy’s immediate perspective. Its loose vignettes reward attention to changing relationships rather than expecting a conventional, steadily plotted story.

A traditional-style story contrasts two sisters: Manyara behaves harshly while Nyasha treats people and creatures kindly. Their journeys towards a king’s choice turn this contrast into a fable about pride, kindness and consequences.

Expect a humorous, performance-friendly story in which cake, sounds and expressive illustrations create a playful appeal.

A long, sweeping fantasy about a farm boy and newly hatched dragon confronting an evil empire. Its appeal lies in adventure, magic, training, invented cultures and the growing responsibilities attached to power.

This is a high-school romantic story about heartbreak, self-presentation, friendship, family expectations, Iranian-American identity, and the effects of the Muslim ban on relatives in Iran.