Synopsis Sometimes Mara feels as if there is a fireball in her head and a roaring behind her eyes. She has rages when she feels that she has to destroy something - and she lashes out at the people around her be they friend or stranger. Her family life is a mess, and it’s the only way she knows to relate and understand others. There is no one she feels that she can trust or who car ...

Synopsis Makeeda loves her life and her friends in London. Her parents wish she'd spend less time texting her mates and more time finding out about her Ghanaian roots.

Review: Far from being an agricultural manual, "Growing Yams in London" follows the coming of age trials and triumphs of a young Londoner of Ghanian heritage.

Makeeda tries to manage fam ...

Planet earth spins lonely in space. Its fragile ecology teems with life found nowhere else in the universe. Tim (Tyrannosaur: Improved Model) takes the job: Defender of the Earth! He’s a monster with car-sized teeth, and a tail that could crush the Houses of Parliament. He’s unstoppable. Until that is, he faces Anna’s father, Professor Mallahide. Anna is the classmate of Chri ...

Synopsis: When Naomi wakes up in a hospital bed, she has no idea how she got there or what has happened during the last three and a half years other life. She doesn’t remember that her parents are divorced,or who her friends are at school, and she doesn’t even know it she has a boyfriend or not. When Naomi gets back to school she starts piecing the fragments of the last thre ...

Kate Carson can’t believe her luck when Dan asks her out. She thinks everything will be perfect, but as time passes, she discovers that nothing and nobody are perfect.

Review Perfect opens with a note from the author explaining that she ‘wanted to write about something that really happens to people and how- in spite of what we’re told- we don’t always b ...

Synopsis: At home, Jamie is obedient, Lebanese-Muslim Jamila. At school, she’s one of the cool crowd. She works hard to keep her real identity from her friends –especially from the boy who likes her.

Review: Set in Australia and told in the first person, this novel gives readers an insight into the tensions and conflicts experienced by the teenaged Jamila as she ...

Synopsis: Returning to England after a dramatic voyage, Sam Witchall is taken on as a midshipman to serve on Nelson's flagship HMS Victory.

Review: This is the third and final instalment of Sam Witchall's seafaring adventures. We met him first in in Nelson's fleet in Powder Monkey, at the age of thirteen, then transported for a crime he didn't comm ...

Synopsis: No-one can tell you what's true, you have to find out for yourself. Jake;s dad saw the wolf, before Jake was born. They say wolves don't live in this country, yet in the night Jake hears it howling, long and lonely. When Jake and Lucy hike to Sheldon Mountain in search of the wolf, Jake is out to prove his dad right or wrong; Lucy is escaping her father's cruelty. ...

Synopsis: Thirty-five years before a girl named Lyra Belacqua came to change their lives, a Texan balloonist meets an armoured bear in the frozen lands of the wild north. In this untamed frontier, where ruthless corporations strive to exert their authority and the noble race of bears live as second-class citizens to the pioneers who have taken their lands. It is a place where the rule o ...

When Nicole Dryburgh was 11 she was diagnosed with a tumour on her spine and was treated by surgery and radiotherapy, successfully everyone thought. Then in December 2002 she became desperately ill and had to be rushed to King’s College Hospital. In January 2003 her mother told that Nicole had only a few weeks to live. Nicole was 18 in February 2007. She is blind and confined mainly to a ...