Usborne Publishing

After the heroics of athletes at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2024, comes a wonderfully illustrated book about all those sports that we know (and perhaps don’t know!) and love.

In The Boy to Beat the Gods, the gods are the enemy. Every few years, they will arrive to harvest their forbidden fruit from the great baobab tree, before taking offerings and human sacrifices from the village. These Orishas – inspired by the Yoruba spirits of West Africa – are not your friend.

Safiya and Halima are two teenagers connected by a fraught family thread, but their view of one another changes drastically from suspicion and disdain to a tentative bond. This is a story of all the confusing, stressful moving parts that come into play when one is growing into adulthood. With continuous secrets and cliffhangers from the troubled past of Safiya and Halima’s families trickled throughout, by carefully delivering significant plot points at select moments, the reader is very much kept on their toes, and our opinions of characters can fluctuate from one chapter to the next.

Said and Tiwa do not get along. But they used to be best friends, and there’s nothing like a funeral for bringing people together. Even if that didn’t quite work, there’s always Eid and a fire at a cherished local Islamic centre to really seal the deal. Hands forced by circumstance and equipped with a bitterness that only comes from having once been truly great friends, Said and Tiwa must negotiate being back in each other’s orbit in this dual-perspective novel, sharing an uneasy if common objective to save their community space.

Nellie Wanderday is a famous explorer and is on her latest mission investigating the deep-sea ecosystem. Her daughter, Flo, aspires to be just like her mum, while her son, Joseph, would be too anxious and doubtful ever try. But, when Nellie’s boat goes missing on her latest expedition, the siblings must make it their mission to find her.

Priya is exhausted from trying to be perfect all the time. She’s perfect at home, perfect at school and perfect in her gymnastics training. In order to be that perfect, you need to tell a few lies. But one day, Priya puts a bangle on her wrist and suddenly finds that she has to tell the truth; the whole truth and nothing but the truth. The bangle isn’t coming off and Priya has a lot to learn if she wants to stay out of trouble …

Running from her past, Sade Hussein arrives at the elite Alfred Nobel Academy hoping to leave her secrets behind. Instead, she becomes entangled in a web of mystery and darkness when her new roommate goes missing without explanation.

Set in the cold dark English countryside, Phil Hickes contribution to the boarding school genre brings a spooky twist and puzzling mystery for readers who like ghostly hauntings.

James isn’t coping with his parents’ breakup. He is deeply unhappy with how his life has changed, and longs for what he remembers as a perfect childhood with his mum and dad. Written in a way that’s clear and believable, many children might relate to the feeling that ‘things will never be the same’. The story shifts as James perceptions of his memories change. By the end, James doesn’t want to be stuck in the past – the present and future are more hopeful and interesting!

The setting for this twisty whodunnit is classic Agatha Christie; a locked room, murder in a mega mansion somewhere in England and home to the chilliest of rich families, the Vanfortes. We even have a blizzard, so no one can leave for the night in question. It’s rather as if the boardgame Cluedo came to life, all secret passageways and vanishing murder weapons.