Orion Children's Books

Maria Motúnráyo Adébísi’s debut novel is the first in a new and exhilarating fantasy series based on West African Mythology. When thirteen-year-old orphaned protagonist, Koku, accidentally unleashes an evil demon spirit during a school trip to the British Museum, his uncle sends him away for the summer. Tired of feeling unwanted, frustratingly misunderstood and of fighting his daily battle with sickle cell anaemia, Koku arrives to the home he doesn’t remember, Olori, feeling powerless.

Ash, from the Last Village, is forced to leave his home when the water supply dries up and the other villagers vanish without trace. In a world that seems to be slowing burning in the ever-increasing heat, water is humanity’s most precious resource – and it’s running out.

Yesterday Crumb is pulled away from a life as a mere circus speculation to a new magical adventure every day. This element made the book super enjoyable to read as well as the family and friends Yesterday found along the way.

What drives some young men in Europe to travel to a country they know little about and pick up a gun? This fast-paced novel by Alan Gibbons doesn’t give you a definitive answer, but it does provide an insight into the devastating impact that this decision can have on the families left behind.

Bee can see what others can’t, especially her older sister Grace who has shut down many aspects of her senses because of her grief. Through Bee’s eyes real and imaginary people live side by side. While Grace is preoccupied with her new boyfriend and sitting at the ‘top table’, Bee’s imagination soars to other realms. She longs to visit Hotel Magnificent to embrace the dead and hopes to be reunited with her parents, whom she lost too young. In her world lines aren’t blurred and realms collide and work together.

There’s an empty chair at the back of the class because a girl left at the end of last year. Nobody pays it any attention until one day a new boy sits there. A strange, quiet boy who never talks or smiles and who disappears at break and lunch. A group of classmates, lead by our intrepid narrator, decide to make friends with this boy, running up to him after school to give him small presents.

The Astonishing Colour of After is the début novel by American author, Emily X.R. Pan. This brave novel tells the story of American-Chinese Leigh, a teenaged girl who has just lost her mother to suicide. The reader travels with Leigh on her journey to Taiwan, where she meets her mother’s estranged parents for the first time. As Leigh explores her mother’s world in Taiwan, she faces ghosts of the past and present, and unearths family secrets that were never meant to be discovered – by her.

Right from the first line, Fitzgerald’s novel immediately drops the reader into the middle of the action, using a very unexpected and chilling point of view from the villain of the story. The very beginning of the novel gives the reader a picture of what is yet to come, which makes it all the more gripping to read. The point of view then alternates between three characters, our villain Jake McCormack, the new kid in town, Luca Spinelli and Clanfedden local, Allie Redmond.

Onjali Q. Raúf, is an activist with a strong track-record of working with refugees and with women and children who are victims of abuse and trafficking. Her first book, which won both the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award for Best Story, offered a child’s perspective of the refugee crisis, and the title under review tackles a range of other socially pertinent issues, the core one being how easy it is for people to slip into homelessness.

When Art’s mother is arrested by witch-hunters, she must flee their village before suspicion turns on her. Armed with her late brother’s sword, her mother’s Recipe Book of healing herbs, and a tightrope that she can almost walk the length of, Art embarks on a perilous horseback journey to England. She intends to rescue her mother from a castle dungeon before the Solstice, when countless innocent women are to be executed.