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Catherine Forde TUG OF WAR

Synopsis: This is a gripping, powerful, and heart-warming story about one girl's choices. In 2012, The Emergency begins as terrorist bombs shatter cities around the UK and wreak havoc on normal life. Molly's parents decide to send her and her brother, John, away from Glasgow to safety in the countryside. Molly is sent to Paradise Farm where she is cared for by Pernilla, who has always wanted a child, and gives Molly everything she desires. Pernilla's youthful enthusiasm is in stark contrast to Molly's own frumpy, daggy mum. Molly is so caught up in her new life that she fails to take action when her friend, Fergal, tells her that John has been sent to live with an abusive farmer. It is not until her mother comes to visit that Molly realises how important her family is, and how close she is to losing them. But now she has to make a choice: Eeny-Meeny Miny mum. Who will Molly choose?

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Matt Whyman INSIDE THE CAGE

Synopsis: Under suspicion for a virtual break-in at Fort Knox, 17-year-old Carl Hobbes finds himself on a rendition flight for questioning by the US military. Taken to an isolated camp in the Arctic wilderness, dedicated to holding terrorists-for-hire, the boy finds all assurances about his safety blow away when one notorious detainee stages an uprising. Cut off from civilisation, and with overnight temperatures plummeting, Hobbes must decide whether his chances of survival are greater inside the cage - or out

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Sam Mills THE BOYS WHO SAVED THE WORLD

Synopsis: Jon knows what he has to do. If he isn't strong, everyone in his school is going to die. Or so he's been told by Jeremiah, the manipulative, deluded leader of the Brotherhood of Hebetheus - a group of lonely, damaged boys who have started a new religion that makes them feel invincible. But when the boys become convinced that a classmate is involved in a plot to blow up the school, they know they must act. No one will believe them and so they lay their own plans - plans that lead to theft, kidnap, a media frenzy, and, ultimately, bloodshed.

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David Thorpe HYBRIDS

Synopsis: thrilling sci-fi novel set in a believeable - and terrifying - near future...Hybrids is the winning entry to the HarperCollins nationwide new author competition with SAGA Magazine. Johnny Online and Kestrella are hybrids - victims of "Creep", a pandemic sweeping the country which causes sufferers to merge with items of technology when over-exposed to their use. Kestrella persuades a wary Johnny to help her find her missing mother, but the Gene Police have other plans for him...Powerful, compelling, and narrated alternately by Johnny and Kes, it questions our human dependence on technology, and our reactions in the face of nationwide panic. This was the outstanding winner of the Children's Book Writing Competition run in conjunction with SAGA Magazine. Orange-prize winning author Helen Dunmore -- one of the judges -- says: "The writing is sharp, the dialogue good, and the action pacey and page-turning. But there's a real depth to this story, too. Like all good fiction it makes the reader see the world in a different light."

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Nicky Singer THE INNOCENT'S STORY

Synopsis: When Cassina is blown-up by a bomb in a station in England, life as she knows it is over. Except that she doesn't die. Cassina survives as something that can live in the heads of humans, knowing their thoughts but powerless to change them. She ends up in a variety of minds - her mum's, her dad's, a mad old lady's, a bigot's - but most scarily of all, she ends up in the head of the man who murdered her. It's an experience that challenges her beliefs and preconceptions, that terrifies her and frustrates her but, most of all, that changes her. Can it change her killer too...? This is Cassina's story, in her voice - a voice that will grip you and goad you, make you laugh and make you cry. It is a voice you will never forget.

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Suzanne Fisher Staples UNDER THE PERSIMMON TREE

Synopsis: An outstanding novel exploring the relationship between a young American woman and a refugee girl. Northern Afghanistan, 2001. When the Taliban takes her brother and father to be soldiers and the bombing of her tiny village kills her mother and baby brother, Najmah makes a dangerous journey over the mountains to Pakistan. Here she meets Elaine, an American woman waiting for her doctor husband to return from the front. Najmah joins Elaine's refugee school under the persimmon tree, until, sure that both their families are dead, Elaine tries to persuade her to go to America. But when Najmah's brother arrives at the school, still alive, she bravely decides to return with him to the village of their birth.