What Are You Looking For?

Expect an imaginative fantasy built around a dangerous darkness, paired roles and a developing relationship. Its strongest focus appears to be how people resist restrictive expectations while learning to trust someone very different from themselves.

Expect a fast-moving, twisty mystery shaped by creepy folklore, family conflict and uncertainty about what Ava can trust. Its strongest features are atmosphere, suspense and clues that invite readers to solve the case alongside her.

A fast-paced adventure follows Ollie into The Haven, a child-run refuge and investigation network. The story combines criminal danger, missing children, bereavement and a threat to London, with friendship developing between Ollie and Dodge.

A lively coming-of-age adventure where friendship, family banter and entrepreneurial schemes meet questions about words, responsibility and belonging. Humour and musical energy sit alongside more serious experiences involving prejudice, peer pressure and policing.

A character-led YA novel about a Muslim teenager negotiating prejudice, family background, self-protection and first love in post-9/11 America. Music and breakdancing provide important ways for Shirin to cope and express herself.

A supernatural friendship story follows Suzy as she lives with bereavement, self-consciousness and uncertainty about Rhiannon. Its emotional centre is the possibility of reconnecting with life while learning that friendship can change.

A warm, idea-led adventure about friendship across a human–robot divide. Its central relationship invites readers to question inherited beliefs, while action and humour keep the story moving.

A fast-moving historical fantasy that places a child and a growing phoenix inside the Great Fire of London. Maps, historical events and an imagined creature create an adventurous route through danger, trust and responsibility.

A gently suspenseful wartime adventure with a strong historical setting. It combines a secret mission and possible betrayal with village tensions, friendship, refugee experience, and the practical importance of art, music and community.

A story about facing prejudice while navigating family worries, friendship and uncertainty about identity. It combines painful school experiences with warmth, music, LGBTQ+ history and a hopeful sense of personal agency.

A suspenseful mystery about a child pursuing truth while separated from her family. Its science-fiction ideas sit alongside friendship, courage and self-discovery, with a hopeful emotional thread reported alongside danger and uncertainty.

This is a socially concerned crime novel that places a homeless teenager in danger while examining how homelessness, family breakdown and public attitudes affect people living on the streets.

This is an adventure about cousins facing separation, institutional hardship and an adult’s deceptive scheme. Their escape becomes a journey towards help, with danger from both human wrongdoing and wolves along the way.

A brisk, atmospheric whodunit offers clues to examine, several viewpoints to compare and a snowbound mansion full of secrets. Its emotional centre is the unexpected bond formed by three very different girls.

This is an imaginative fantasy adventure about siblings entering a winter-bound world and taking part in its liberation. Its moral framework includes courage, sacrifice, repentance, forgiveness and explicitly Christian allegory.

This is a fast-moving historical adventure about two young people and an elephant travelling towards safety while others pursue them. Expect suspense, changing loyalties, grief, humour and questions about who has the right to claim an animal.