Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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Markus Zusak

Rube never loved any of them. He never cared about any of them. He just wanted each one because she was next, and why not take the next thing if it was better than the last? Needless to say, Rube and I aren't too much alike when it comes to women. 
 
Cameron and Ruben have always been loyal brothers, but that loyalty is about to be tested to the limit when Cam falls for Octavia - Rube's latest girlfriend. Will he get the girl? Will his love for her tear their brotherly bond apart? And would Octavia ever go for a guy like him anyway?

Getting the Girl

My name’s Cameron Wolfe. I have a little bit of sense. I don’t have much sense. My older brother Ruben gets me into plenty of trouble. I get Rube into as much trouble as he gets me into. I have a family, yes, that doesn’t really function without tomato sauce. That’s me. 
 
Cameron and Ruben Wolfe are brothers. They spend most of their time throwing one-handed boxing matches (they only have the one pair of gloves) and plotting to rob the local dentists. But what Cameron really wants is to meet a girl – a real girl, not like the ones in the lingerie magazines. But who could ever love an underdog like Cameron Wolfe?

The Underdog

K M Peyton

When Josie is evacuated to her aunt and uncle's farm in Essex, she meets and falls in love with seventeen year old Jumbo, a happy-go-lucky optimistic young man who doesn't let his disability interrupt a life full of fun. Their relationship takes off, despite the difficulties of the war, which interrupts their idyll from time to time with stories of tragedy and death. 
 
But when Josie meets Chris, Jumbo's heroic fighter pilot brother, she experiences feelings that are out of control and dangerous; is this what real love feels like? She is torn between the two young men - one who is steady and loving, the other wayward and challenging. Yet it may not be her choice to make, as the German attack on England becomes more and more dangerous... 
 
Set against the backdrop of the second world war, where people diced with life and death every day, this is a wonderfully moving story of love, passion and tragedy.

Blue Skies and Gunfire

Trevor Colgan

Luke is fed up. Just as his football team has made it to the semi-finals of the All Ireland Schoolboys' League, his mother has decided to move him to Dun Laoghaire. For her it means a new job - perhaps a new man. But for Luke it means the loss of his footballing dream and struggling to fit into a new school. Whom can he trust? Cecilia whose bullying boyfriend wants to beat him to a pulp? Ella the quiet Man City Fan he sits next to? And will he be able to create a half-decent football team in Dun Laoghaire?

The Stretford Enders

Clara has been left a widow, pregnant with another man's child, and it seems as if things could not get worse. But soon her pretty and reckless youngest sister, Ellen, is harshly sentenced to deportation to the newly-discovered land of Australia, alongside many other convicts. And back in Norfolk, Clara becomes the victim of blackmail that puts her in the clutches of the wicked Nat Grover in more ways than one . . . Will her pure love for Prosper Mayes ever survive? 
 
Spanning from the gritty county of Norfolk to the wilds of Australia in the early nineteenth century, the Garlands face huge obstacles in their struggle to survive as a family. Yet, they remain as inimitable and courageous as ever.

Greater Gains

Gareth Thompson

Glenn Jackson is thirteen and has moved with his father from Burnley to Torbeck in the Lake District. His Mum has not come with them and Glenn's father is avoiding Glenn's questions. From the moment Glenn meets Laura, quiet and overshadowed by her vindictive adoptive sister, he is bewitched. 
 
Harlequin is a seven-foot eighteen-year-old living rough in an abandoned shack, disguising himself behind clown's make-up and an old felt hat and hiding in terror whenever the fighter jets have practice runs over Torbeck. When Harlequin rescues Glenn from falling into the old slate mine the two form an unusual friendship and Glenn comes closer to discovering the secret that Harlequin is running away from.

The Great Harlequin Grim

Set just after the Napoleonic wars, Small Gains is the story of Clara, a true heroine who struggles to keep her head above water in a time of poverty and prejudice. Nat, the cruel but incredibly attractive son of the local rich family, turns Clara and her family's lives upside down, both in the world of racing and in the flushes of first love. And with the threat of tuberculosis hanging over them all, Clara faces up to her extraordinary life and loves with certainty and passion.

Small Gains

Aidan Chambers

Karl, aged seventeen, is hopelessly in love. But the object of his affections, Firella, demands proof, and poses him a series of questions regarding his attitude to the many sides of love. But Karl is dyslexic, and convinced that if Firella finds out, she will think he is stupid, and unworthy of her, and leave him. 
So Karl asks a local writer to help him construct his replies - and an unlikely, but extremely touching, friendship develops between the two men. They both come to learn a great deal about about life from a very different perspective, and when an act of violence shatters their calm, they find their respective appraisal of life shifting in profound ways.

Dying to Know You

Jonathan Meredith's life is a disaster, all because of a Greek holiday and Iris, the girl who has brought his world - parents, education, society - tumbling down. So Jonathan seeks refuge with Peter, his jockey friend with ambitions to win the National. Jonathan's life quickly becomes focused on the race, and chances of a very challenging horse . . .

The Last Ditch

In Breaktime, Ditto challenges Morgan to prove that literature is crap and triggers off a chain of events to alter his outlook of life forever. Ditto faces a series of charges from Morgan against literature: that all fiction is Done. Finished. Dead; a sham and a pretence. He undertakes faithfully to record a life in the week of Ditto - with all the chaos of reality thrown in - and his literary creation reveals more about himself than he originally bargained for. 
 
In Dance on My Grave, life in his seaside town is uneventful for Hal Robinson, nothing unusual, exciting or odd ever happens to him - until now that is. Until the summer of his 16th birthday when he reaches a crossroads of choices in life. He foolishly takes a friend's boat for a day's sailing, gets into difficulty and is rescued by Barry Gorman. Their ensuing relationship results in a tumultous summer for Hal as he experiences the intense emotions of his first teenage love.

Breaktime & Dance on My Grave

Sangu Mandanna

Eva's life is not her own. She is a creation, an abomination – an echo. Made by the Weavers as a copy of someone else, she is expected to replace a girl named Amarra, her 'other', if she ever died. Eva studies what Amarra does, what she eats, what it's like to kiss her boyfriend, Ray. So when Amarra is killed in a car crash, Eva should be ready. 
 
But fifteen years of studying never prepared her for this. 
 
Now she must abandon everything she's ever known – the guardians who raised her, the boy she's forbidden to love – to move to India and convince the world that Amarra is still alive . . .

The Lost Girl

At the age of nine Andrew Kindness witnesses the horrific death of a father and son who are sucked into quicksand on the shores of Millom's estuary in Cumbria. Unable to help at the time, Andy grows haunted by the guilt and memory of this terrible event. When his granddad shows him the art of cross-breeding daffodils some years later, Andy finds solace in the beauty of the flowers, but he keeps his hobby secret from the prying eyes of the village. 
 
That is until Angie Hutchinson, the cleverest and prettiest girl in the school, needs Andy's help to produce a radio show to commemorate the anniversary of Wordsworth's famous Daffodils poem. Their growing friendship gives Andy the strength he needs to let go of the past and face up to his dad's illness. 
 
A moving novel that explores both the beauty and bleakness of life and the effect that the past can have on shaping the future - beautifully written in Gareth Thompson's fresh prose.

Sunshine to the Sunless

Fifteen-year-old Samson Ashburner has always felt like an outsider - even before the accident that left his face scarred and his confidence shattered. With the jeers and taunts of the local children and his mother ringing in his ears, Samson malingers like a dark cloud over the Cumbrian landscape. His only refuge is his ancestor's charcoal-burning hut deep in the nearby woods and it is here that he encounters Angel Obscura, a gypsy girl who teachers Samson that not everybody takes him at face value. But Angel is not all that she seems, and Samson is drawn into a web of deceit and shady dealings with an explosive outcome.

The Anarchist's Angel

Keith Gray

'Hundreds of people want to be in a band. They all get guitars and they all play gigs and they all write songs, and they still never make it.'There's a big difference between being a rock star and a pop idol - Will and Danny know which they'd prefer to be. They form the group Happy and it seems they are on the way to realising their ambitions. But when Happy's first gig is cut short by a fire at the venue, Will struggles to cope with his bitter disappointment and retreats into his private world, rejecting everyone around him. His girlfriend, Beth turns to Danny for comfort and their friendship soon becomes something more. With nothing left for him at home, Will leaves for London to stay with his session-musician father and to follow his dream.

Happy

Judith Fathallah

"You've eaten too much, you fat pig." 
 
When Jessica was thirteen years old, she met the Monkey. 
 
The Monkey lived inside her: a driving, fiery voice telling her that thinness was the only way. The only way to be safe, to be good, to be acceptable and above all, to escape from the cold, looming threat of approaching adulthood. Jessica listened to the Monkey, and it consumed her. 
 
This is the illuminating story of a teenage girl's wanderings in darkness: the spiral down into madness, the terrible realities of an adolescent psychiatric unit, and the stark choice that she must either tame her monster - or die. 
 
Through memory, reflection, and enduring black humour, Jessica makes a tenuous peace with the world and with her emerging adult self.

Monkey Taming

Tabitha Suzuma

In his final year at the Royal College of Music, star pianist Flynn Laukonen has the world at his feet. He has moved in with his girlfriend Jennah and is already getting concert bookings for what promises to be a glittering career. Yet he knows he is skating on thin ice - only two small pills a day keep him from plunging back into the whirlpool of manic depression that once threatened to destroy him. Unexpectedly his friends seem to be getting annoyed with him for no apparent reason, he needs less and less sleep, he is filled with unbridled energy. Events begin to spiral out of control and Flynn suddenly finds himself in hospital, heavily sedated, carnage left behind him. The medication isn't working any more, the dose needs to be increased, and depression strikes again, this time with horrific consequences. His freedom is snatched away and the medicine's side-effects threaten to jeopardize his chances in one of the biggest piano competitions of his life. It seems like he has to make a choice between the medication and his career. But in all this he has forgotten the one person he would give his life for, and Flynn suddenly finds himself facing the biggest sacrifice of all.

A Voice in the Distance

Subtitled The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn this is the story of Cordelia from the time she is 15 until she is 20. She is pregnant and plans to give this account to her daughter on her 16th birthday so that they can share their youth together. She chooses the old and famous Japanese book, 'The Pillow Book' by Sei Shonagon, as a model in order to include all kinds of things she has already written as well as the episodes and thoughts she has now as she compiles her book. 
 
She tells of her mother (who died when Cordelia was 5) of her father and her aunt Doris (who marry when she is 16), of her love for William Blacklin, the boy with whom she chooses to have her first sex - and with whom she falls deeply in love. She writes about Julie Martin her teacher who helps her spiritually, describes her love affair with an older married man and her terrifying sexual experience with an unbalanced young man who is obsessed with her. The book includes thoughts on being a women, on poetry, music, reading and writing, on being pregnant and finally of her marriage to William. 
 
This Is All is an anthology, written in six 'books' of Cordelia's adolescent life, by turns funny, poignant, sad, exciting, fascinating ironic and truthful about topics that parents often do not tell their children. It is a richly entertaining and challenging read.

This Is All

Adèle Geras

The Tower Room: Loosely based on Rapunzel, this is the story of a sudden, unexpected, passionate relationship and the unforessen yet inevitable results of defying convention. When Megan glimpses Simon from her tower room, their worlds are changed forever. 
 
Watching the Roses: A modern version of Sleeping Beauty, this is a haunting tale of treachery and betrayal. An ill-wishing has been placed on Alice, and it seems to be coming true. 
 
Pictures of the Night: A retelling of the Snow White fairytale, this is a thirlling story of jealousy and enchantment. Is Bella's stepmother really as wicked as she believes?

Happy Ever After

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