Politics and activism

In the not-so-distant future, the world has finally recognised the threat posed by climate change. When Rory, an adventurous and nature-loving, girl isolated from her schoolmates by family circumstance is granted the opportunity to explore a re-wilded far north, she's thrilled.

Eighteen year old Salama volunteers as a nurse at her local hospital in Syria. For fifty years, the country has been under dictatorship, and the Free Syrian Army has taken to the streets to protect civilians.

This is the second collection of poetry by Gambian British poet Sophia Thakur. Through her strong narrative voice and arresting language, this collection explores Sophia’s expressed need to understand how the women in her life became so ‘compassionate, fierce, gentle and powerful.’ Loosely grouped into themes, the collection covers a broad range of subjects, woven through with common threads of love, God, and the formidable influence of her family and friends. Her poems resonate with a powerful rhythm.

The Light Thieves is an exciting new series that follows Grain and his friends as they work together to search for Grain's missing sister, Solas, who has run off to a wonderful, high-tech new city developed by billionaire Howard Hansom. However, along with Grain, we soon begin to see that not everything is as it seems.

The Last Storyteller opens with a promise of a new adventure for Petra. Petra and her family are amongst a select group of people chosen to travel to a new planet to start a new life, as a comet is on track to destroy Earth. However, this journey is not what Petra is expecting. The many twists and turns in the plot will keep the reader engaged and the pages turning.

In this short but excellent novel we follow Elsie, a young Jewish girl growing up during the 1930s in Stepney, London. Elsie and her brother Mikey live in a primarily Jewish area, although there are some Irish immigrants also. The two spend much of their childhood playing games with their friends, including Nathan, whose spectacular imagination shrouds them in worlds of their own making. However, with the rise of Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, their world of make-believe soon begins to disappear as antisemitism rises and friendships fall apart.

This is an inspiring collection of poetry, gorgeously illustrated and presented. The cloth bound cover promises magic within, and the book delivers on every page. Editor Ella Risabridger’s introduction sets the tone and both it and the conclusion are thought provoking and beautiful. They whisper gently about acceptance of all our different ways of being, about stepping into our own power and what it means to be alive in this time.

Orla Carson has closed herself off from the world when her Ma died. All she wants is to be left alone in her garden with her horse and the plants whose whispers she understands. But when a mysterious illness comes to the village of Thorn Creek and the blame is cast on nature and the wild, she must leave and embark on a journey in search of a cure. With only her Ma’s book of plants and remedies as a guide, she must begrudgingly team up with Idris and Ariana, who are hunting for the cure for their own reasons.