Embedded Files
Stuck for a book? Not sure which book to read next? Want to try a new genre?
Listen to an extract from the books below to help make your mind up.
If you click on the book title you can read the extract yourself.
All of these books are available to borrow from the Knowledge Cafe.
If you enjoy these extracts you can find similar books here.
Wonder.mp3Auggie wants to be an ordinary student at his new school. He does ordinary things - eating ice cream, playing on his Xbox. He feels ordinary - inside. But ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming in playgrounds. Ordinary kids aren't stared at wherever they go.
All he wants is to be accepted - but can he convince his new classmates that he's just like them, underneath it all?
(AR BL: 4.8)
Northern Lights.mp3Lyra Belacqua and her animal daemon live half-wild and carefree among scholars of Jordan College, Oxford.
The destiny that awaits her will take her to the frozen lands of the Arctic, where witch-clans reign and ice-bears fight.
Her extraordinary journey will have immeasurable consequences far beyond her own world…
(AR BL: 6.2)
my friend the enemy.mp3Summer, 1941. For Peter, the war is a long way away, being fought by a faceless enemy, marching across places he's never seen. Until the night it comes to him. A German plane is shot down over the woods that his Dad looked after, before he went off to fight. Peter rushes to the crash site to find something exciting to keep. But what he finds instead is someone: a young and injured German airman. The enemy. Here. And in trouble. Suddenly, helping him seems like the right thing to do.
(AR BL: 4.7)
Wolf Wilder.mp3Feodora and her mother live in the snowbound woods of Russia, in a house full of food and fireplaces. Ten minutes away, in a ruined chapel, lives a pack of wolves. Feodora's mother is a wolf wilder, and Feo is a wolf wilder in training.
When the murderous hostility of the Russian Army threatens her very existence, Feo is left with no option but to go on the run....
(AR BL: 4.5)
Skulduggery Pleasant.mp3Meet the great Skulduggery Pleasant: wise-cracking detective, powerful magician, master of dirty tricks and burglary (in the name of the greater good, of course).
Oh yeah. And dead.
Then there's his sidekick, Stephanie. She's... well, she's a twelve-year-old girl. With a pair like this on the case, evil had better watch out...
(AR BL: 4.9)
Christmas Dinner of Souls - Ross Montgomery
Christmas Dinner of Souls - Ross Montgomery
It's a dark and lonely Christmas Eve in the dining room of ancient Soul's College. The kitchen boy, Lewis, has helped prepare a highly unusual meal, made with unrecognisable ingredients, cooked by a mysterious chef. And then the guests arrive ... and carnage ensues.
(AR BL: 5.3)
The Monsters of Rookhaven.mp3Mirabelle is a monster.
In fact, her whole family are monsters, brought together by magic and living in the magnificent Rookhaven mansion.
But there’s a gap in the glamour, protecting their home from the outside world. It allows two human children to enter pursued by a monster that even monsters fear. Can Mirabelle protect her family from the terrifying creature hunting them?
Boy Everywhere.mp313 year old Sami has a good life in Damascus, playing football and computer games with his friends, nagging his parents for new trainers and trying to get time on the iPad. Although he knows there is war in the rest of the country, he never seriously imagines it will reach Damascus.
When a bomb goes off at a shopping mall his family decide to sell everything and flee Syria. So begins Sami’s journey across Europe, and into danger, poverty and fear.
The Graveyard Book.mp3When a baby escapes a murderer intent on killing the entire family, who would have thought it would find safety and security in the local graveyard?
Brought up by the resident ghosts and ghouls, Bod has a crazy childhood learning about life from the dead. But the murderer is still out there looking for him...
(AR BL: 5.1)
Mortal Engines.mp3In a dangerous future, huge motorized cities hunt, attack and fight each other for survival.
As London pursues a small town, young apprentice Tom is flung out into the wastelands, where a terrifying cyborg begins to hunt him down....
(AR BL: 6.6)
In the blink of an eye all the adults disappear in a small town in southern California and no one knows why. Cut off from the outside world, those that are left are trapped, and there's no help on the way. Sam Temple and his friends must do all they can to survive. Chaos rules the streets. Gangs begin to form. Sides are chosen - strong or weak. Cruel or humane. And then there are those who begin to develop powers ...
( AR BL: 4.3)
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