An empowering poem on migration and diversity creating an understanding for the fact that it takes so little to turn a ‘someone’ into a refugee because, following the speaker, we ‘all came here from somewhere’.

A poem calling for justice, respect and equality. Zephaniah reflects on the diverse backgrounds of the people currently living in the United Kingdom, all mixed up in the shape of a recipe.

Powerful teenage fiction about how to not give up in life even though you are facing terminal illness. This young adult novel follows 16-year-old cancer patient Hazel. Reluctantly attending a meeting of her cancer support group, she happens to meet Augustus, a boy she soon feels drawn to, even more so when they discover their […]

A dystopian novel between loyalty and betrayal, publicity and privacy. When Mae is offered to work at The Circle, an influential tech company, she could not be happier. It is only when she realizes the company’s desire to permeate ever more fields of their customers’ lives that Mae starts to wonder where the use of […]

A young adult novel about otherness and isolation. When 15-year-old Bobby wakes up one day and realizes he’s suddenly invisible, he doesn’t know what to do. Everything around him continues, only he’s not there. Then he meets Alicia, who’s blind, and feels seen again. But he has to find out how to undo his invisibility […]

A children’s dark fantasy novel set in a world where societies of witches exist. Their goal is to hunt human children and make them disappear in mysterious ways, but a young boy and his Norwegian grandmother are determined to stop them.

A novel for younger learners of English on power, hierarchy and the value of words and creativity. Protagonist Nick is the class clown at school. When he has to write an essay on where words come from, he gets an idea. This is when he starts calling a pen a frindle. The word spreads quickly, […]

Book one of the series Percy Jackson & the Olympians is an empowering, American fantasy-adventure novel based on Greek mythology. 12-year-old Percy Jackson has ADHD and dyslexia and feels out of place at school. When he discovers he is a demigod, the son of a human and a Greek god, a whole new world unfolds. […]

A novel about a curious friendship between a pig, Wilbur, and a spider, Charlotte, living on a farm. When Wilbur realises he is going to be eventually slaughtered, Charlotte promises to save him. She starts weaving words of praise about Wilbur into her web, making him a tourist attraction.

A dystopian novel about conformity and otherness set in a world where every teenager is transformed from an “ugly” into a “pretty” with the help of extreme cosmetic surgery when they turn 16. 15-year-old Tally can’t wait, but her friends Shay and David show her the downsides of their society, which causes her to rebel. […]

A book series surrounding two siblings, Jack and Annie Smith, traveling through space and time in a magic tree house. Their adventures range from watching dinosaurs and meeting Shakespeare to being dropped into the American Civil War. Suitable for interdisciplinary teaching, primarily in the subjects History, Geography, and Biology. The “Fact Trackers” are non-fiction books […]

This novel portrays abuse, resilience, violence and a girl fighting for her rights. The story follows 15-year-old Aiyana’s escape from a brutal patriarchal riverboat community in Arkansas in the 1930s. Having been denied any education and having suffered from her abusive father, this young heroine sets out to flee with only her grandmother and brother […]

This story about loss and release came second in the Costa Short Story Awards 2019: The reader follows a father and his son on a hike along a mountainous path. What starts as a nice enough pastime quickly makes a turn for the worse…

The young wizard Harry broadens his knowledge and skills in the second volume of the Harry Potter series. Together with his friends Ron and Hermine, he critically investigates Hogwart’s history and the continuing conflict between students from Gryffindor and Slytherin – in which identity seems to play a major role.

The speaker of this poem gives a detailed description of how to write a sonnet: After describing the metre and the rhyme scheme, the speaker comes to the conclusion that writing a sonnet is not that difficult…

A poem on worries, anxieties, fears and other what-ifs. The speaker describes how, at night, he lies awake and asks himself “what if questions”. He doubts himself and worries about all the things that could go wrong in the near future.

A dystopian novel on gender, sex, fertility, rebellion, and love. In the near future, most women have become infertile and the USA have transformed into a theocracy where women are either the wives of party officials, supposed to take care of the household, or have to take part in a bizarre ritual. Offred is one […]

A magical realist novel about dependence and independence, myth and reality, power and self-reflexivity. Saleem is born at midnight, 15 August 1947, which is India’s day of independence. Growing up, he discovers his telepathic abilities and finds out that children born in India on this particular day (so-called Midnight’s Children) are gifted with magical powers. […]