Material appropriate for young adults
In 1453, seventeen-year-old Luca Vero, accused of heresy and expelled from his monastery, is recruited to help investigate evil across Europe but frees his first subject, Isolde, from captivity in a nunnery, and together they seek the one who defends the boundaries of Christendom and holds the secrets of the Order of Darkness.
The TimeRiders travel back to Robin Hood’s Middle Ages to search for the mythical Holy Grail and to stop the future from changing.
In England, a beautiful, manipulative teenaged girl affiliated with a group of political anarchists seduces both seventeen-year-old Jamie and his older brother, a wounded veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
After her near-fatal run-in with the Jack the Ripper copycat, Rory Devereaux has been living in Bristol under the close watch of her parents. So when her therapist suddenly suggests she return to Wexford, Rory jumps at the chance to get back to her friends. But Rory’s brush with the Ripper touched her more than she thought possible: she’s become a human terminus, with the power to eliminate ghosts on contact. She soon finds out that the Shades—the city’s secret ghost-fighting police—are responsible for her return. The Ripper may be gone, but now there is a string of new inexplicable deaths threatening London. Rory has evidence that the deaths are no coincidence. Something much more sinister is going on, and now she must convince the squad to listen to her before it’s too late. In this follow-up to the Edgar Award-nominated THE NAME OF THE STAR, Maureen Johnson adds another layer of spectacularly gruesome details to the streets of London that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end.
Is it possible to fall in love with someone you’ve never met? Imogen Summers thinks so because it’s happened to her. Immy is a normal eighteen-year-old, with a normal life, a normal family, and a normal boyfriend. But when she finds herself falling for a girl on an Internet message board, a girl she knows only as the mysterious Fickle, her so-called normal life is suddenly turned on its head. As her relationship with Fickle develops into more than just friendship, Immy finds another message board friend, the sweet and lovely Freddie, the perfect person to confide in. But can Freddie stay out of it when she starts to fall for Immy herself? Things are about to get complicated…
Life’s hard for Lia. When Lia wins $8 million in the lottery, suddenly everything is different. However new problems begin for Lia. Resentful girls at school set up a “We Hate Lia” Facebook group . . . with fans in the thousands. Her friend Shazia won’t have anything to do with Lia’s fortune, believing gambling to be immoral. The mother of her other best friend, Jack, is threatening to sue Lia. Raf’s behavior is getting stranger, and Lia wonders whether there’s something to the rumors that he’s . . . potentially paranormal. And when her sister, Natasha, goes missing, Lia begins to wonder if a millionaire lifestyle is all it’s cracked up to be. Will Lia’s fortune create more problems than it solves?
When seventeen-year-old orphaned shapechanger Tessa Gray is kidnapped by the villainous Mortmain in his final bid for power, the London Institute rallies to save her, but is beset by danger and betrayal at every turn.
Samuel’s parents and young sister, innocent bystanders during an uprising, are killed by South African police. Samuel is sent to live with his uncle, a tribal chief in the Bantu homeland, while his brother vows to join the African National Congress armed struggle and avenge his family’s deaths. In the homeland, Samuel discovers he can run faster than anyone and before long begins to train under his English-educated uncle. Years later, after the end of Apartheid, Samuel is selected as the token black South African athlete to run in the Olympics. President Nelson Mandela is there when he wins his gold medal, and Samuel dedicates it to ‘a very special man… I was running for the President. I was running for my country. This powerful and moving story portrays what it was like for blacks growing up in South Africa aunder Apartheid and the different ways in which they struggled to gain their freedom. For some, like Samuel’s brother, it was an armed struggle, but for Samuel it was the opportunity to prove he could run better than any white man.
A fifteen-year-old boy lives amongst the rubbish piles in the slums of Cairo and collects broken glass while hoping to find a future he can believe in.