Different for Boys
Patrick Ness
The Sinister Booksellers of Bath
Garth Nix
Return to the enchanting world of ‘The Left-Handed Booksellers of London‘ in this sequel by Garth Nix, bestselling master of teen fantasy, where once again a team of booksellers must fight to keep dangerous magic under cover before the stuff of legends destroys our world.
There is often trouble of a mythical sort in Bath. The booksellers who police the Old World keep a careful watch there, particularly on the entity that inhabits the ancient hot spring.
This time trouble comes from the discovery of a sorcerous map, leading left-handed bookseller Merlin into great danger, requiring a desperate rescue attempt from his sister, the right-handed bookseller Vivien, and art student Susan Arkshaw, who is still struggling to deal with her own recently discovered magical heritage.
The map takes the trio to a place separated from this world, maintained by deadly sorcery and guarded by monstrous living statues. But this is only the beginning. To unravel the secrets of a murderous Ancient Sovereign, the booksellers must investigate centuries of disappearances and deaths. If they do not stop her, she will soon kill again. And this time, her target is not an ordinary mortal.
Nightbirds
Kate J. Armstrong
The Nightbirds are Simta’s best-kept secret: Girls with a unique and powerful magic they can gift with just a kiss. Some would kill to possess them; the church would kill them outright. But protected by the Great Houses, the Nightbirds are well-guarded treasures.
As this Season’s Nightbirds, Matilde, Æsa, and Sayer will spend their nights bestowing their gifts to well-paying clients. Once their season is through, they’re each expected to marry a Great House lord and become mothers to the next generation of Nightbirds before their powers fade away. But as they find themselves at the heart of a political scheme that threatens not only their secrets, but their very lives, their future suddenly becomes uncertain.
When they discover that there are other girls like them and that their magic is far more than they were told, they see the Nightbird system for what it is: a gilded cage. Now they must make a choice—to remain kept birds or take control, remaking the city that dared to clip their wings.
Catfish Rolling
Clara Kumagai
There’s a catfish under Japan and when it rolls the land rises and falls. At least, that’s what Sora was told after she lost her mother to an earthquake so powerful that it cracked time itself. Sora and her father are some of the few who still live near one of these “zones”—the places where time has been irrevocably sped up or slowed down.
Sora’s father leads a research team studying the zones, and even as his colleagues begin to fall ill, he refuses to stop entering the zones himself. Sora finds herself stuck and increasingly alone as her father starts behaving strangely—he’s disoriented and his memory seems to be deteriorating. Sora, meanwhile, has been secretly conducting her own research on the zones, tracking down a time expert in Tokyo and surprising herself with a crush on a strikingly confident girl named Maya, another hafu girl with whom she forms an instant bond.
But when Sora’s father disappears, she has no choice but to return home, with Maya in tow, and venture deep into the abandoned time zones to find him and perhaps the catfish itself…
She is a Haunting
Trang Thanh Tran
Jade Nguyen has always lied to fit in. She’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough – at least for this summer with her estranged father in Vietnam. Just five weeks of ignoring the quietly decaying French colonial house he’s fixing up, then college and freedom are hers.
But soon Jade begins waking up every morning certain that something has clawed down her throat … from the inside. Then the ghost of a beautiful bride visits her with a cryptic warning: DON’T EAT.
When her father and little sister don’t believe her, Jade decides to scare them into leaving by staging some haunting events of her own. She recruits Florence, the daughter of her dad’s business associate (and more of a distraction than Jade bargained for) to help.
But the house has other plans. It’s hungry. A home, after all, is only as powerful as those who breathe new life into its bones. And this one is determined never to be abandoned again …
Happyhead
Josh Silver
When Seb is offered a place on a radical retreat designed to solve the national crisis of teenage unhappiness, he is determined to change how people see him and make his parents proud.
But as he finds himself drawn to the enigmatic Finn, Seb starts to question the true nature of the challenges they must undergo.
The deeper into the programme the boys get, the more disturbing the assessments become, until it’s clear there may be no escape…
