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Phil Earle
A warm football adventure uses Pickles’s humorous viewpoint to explore a family trying to stay together while money problems and housing insecurity affect everyday life.
Ciara Smyth
A lively, first-person school story combines farcical problem-solving and slow-burn romance with serious family instability. Its emotional centre is Aideen’s habit of helping others while struggling to address her own circumstances.
Polly Ho-Yen
A thoughtful migration story combines everyday hardship with magical realism. Leelu’s loneliness, her brother’s difficulties and the family’s uncertainty make belonging feel complicated rather than instantly solved.
Kelly Yang
This is a socially aware family story with a determined child protagonist. It combines motel life, immigrant family pressures and Mia’s writing ambitions, while presenting difficult injustices alongside friendship, support and attempts to help others.
Harper Lee
This is a coming-of-age story in which Scout and Jem encounter racism, inequality and adult moral choices. Its child’s-eye perspective presents these difficult social realities, but does not make its language or events gentle.
John Steinbeck
This is a demanding, historically grounded family story that combines severe hardship with compassion, solidarity and social criticism. Its emotional force comes from people trying to preserve dignity and connection while facing displacement, hunger and injustice.
Michael Rosen, illustrated by Tony Ross
This offers a contemporary child’s perspective on poverty and family difficulty, deliberately read beside Oliver Twist. Its strongest feature is the connection between classroom literature and problems affecting Shona’s life.
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