The Teenage Book list is selected annually by librarians from the Schools Library Service and secondary schools, and is a list of recommended fiction to buy for your school library.
The teen list represents a selection of the best new fiction first published in paperback within the last 12 months, and covers a diverse range of subjects, genres, authors and interests.
Titles from the Teen and Primary lists will be chosen for the Tower Hamlets Book Award short list in July. Remember to let us know if you want to participate in this event!
Posters for the 2024 booklists will be delivered to subscribing schools!
Please contact the library for more information on the Teen List or to request additional posters (subscribing schools only – subject to availability).
See the full list of books
| Title | Author | Blurb |
| Where the light goes | Barnard, Sara | In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, protagonist Emma finds herself grappling with the shattered pieces of her once idyllic life. As she struggles to make sense of her new reality, she embarks on a poignant quest for healing, guided by unexpected friendships and the resilience of the human spirit. |
| You’re not supposed to die tonight | Bayron, Kalynn | At Camp Mirror Lake, guests pay to be scared in a full-contact terror game. Charity Curtis has been cast as the ‘final girl’ as her summer crew recreate scenes from a classic slasher film, Curse of Camp Mirror Lake. But when people start disappearing and one shows up dead, Charity and her girlfriend need to figure out what this killer is after. Is there is more to the story of Mirror Lake and its dangerous past than Charity ever suspected? |
| Warrior girl unearthed | Boulley, Angeline | 16-year-old Perry Firekeeper-Birch plans to quit her museum internship until she meets ‘Warrior Girl,’ a Native American ancestor locked away in the archives. Determined to bring her home, Perry orchestrates a daring heist with friends, uncovering deeper secrets that must be rectified to preserve their ancestors’ legacy. |
| You could be so pretty | Bourne, Holly | Set in a dystopian world, where girls are expected to maintain impossible beauty standards, there are two options for girls: be a Pretty or be an Objectionable. Belle works hard to be crowned a Pretty whereas Joni, works hard to escape the Education to be an Objectionable. Can these two girls from different worlds, work together, destroy the rules and set themselves free? |
| Away with Words | Cameron, Sophie | Gala and her dad, from Cataluña to a town in Scotland. Gala doesn’t speak much English, and feels unable to be her usual funny self. Until she befriends Natalie, a girl with selective mutism. The two find their own ways to communicate, which includes collecting other people’s discarded words. They use the words to write anonymous supportive poems for their classmates, but then someone begins leaving nasty messages using the same method – and the girls are blamed. |
| Kicked out | Dassu, A.M. | Ali is a regluar year 8 kid, hoping to have the best summer ever with his friends Sami and Mark. But things don’t go as planned. Mark and Ali have been kicked out of their friends house and their friend Aadam is facing deportation. To top it off, Ali’s dad, who abandoned the family when Ali was little, is suddenly turning up everywhere in town, and a half-brother Ali never knew has shown up at Ali’s school. |
| Electric Life | Delahaye, Rachel | Estrella is the perfect society. Everyone says so. But the nearest thing to a challenge is the constant stream of digital entertainment and virtual reality games that simulate a natural world that no longer exists. And that’s not enough for Alara. She’s bored. So, when she gets the chance to execute a secret mission in the toxic, dangerous wastes of London Below, she jumps at the chance even though it terrifies her as much as it excites her. |
| Forget me not | Derrick, Alyson | Stevie, and her girlfriend Nora have a plan. They will leave their small, ultra-conservative town and families behind after graduation and move to California, where they can finally stop hiding their love. but, when Stevie has a terrible fall, causing her to forget the last two years, she finds herself in a life she doesn’t quite understand. Can the two beat the odds a second time and find their way back together when “together” itself is just a lost memory? |
| The witches of Pendle | Fielding, Yvette | A new family arrives in Pendle and discover a witch’s bottle filled with curses. Shortly after, the ghosts of the accused witches of the Pendle Witch Trials are released and looking for revenge. Ghost hunters Eve, Clovis and Tom must go up against the powerful witches and try and stop them before it’s too late. |
| Crossing the line | Fisher, Tia | Erik’s life has been falling apart ever since his dad died. Homework and being good at school stop feeling important when you’re the new man of the house. When Erik’s bad behaviour attracts the wrong crowd, he’s sucked into a terrifying new world of drug dealing, trap houses and violence. Making money feels good but Erik soon learns that a small favour can become a huge debt. |
| Wild Song | Gourlay, Candy | The year is 1904. Luki has lived a tribal life in the mountains of the Philippines. Now she’s growing up, she is expected to become a wife and a mother, but Luki isn’t ready to give up her dream to become a warrior.When her tribe are offered a journey to America to be part of the St. Louis World’s Fair, Luki will discover that the land of opportunity does not share its possibilities equally . . . |
| Boy Like me | Green, Simon James | Jamie Hampton reads a novel and his whole world changes. When a kind librarian leads Jamie to a disguised novel in the library that reflects his own confused feelings towards boys, Jamie sees that he’s not the only one who has checked the book out. |
| This Book Kills | Guron, Ravena | When the most popular and richest kid in Jess Choudhary’s school, is found dead, everyone is left reeling and wondering who the murderer could be… Jess finds herself at the centre of the investigation when it’s revealed that he died in the exact same way as a character in a short story she wrote. |
| Threads that bind | Hatzopoulou, Kika | Lo is decended from the fates. She has the ability to see threads that bind people together. Io must follow clues through the city’s darkest corners and unearth a conspiracy that involves some of the city’s most powerful players—before destruction comes to her own doorstep. |
| Stone | Hawkins, Finbar | When Sam discovers a silver-flecked stone after his father’s death, strange occurrences unfold. Magic and myth converge on the ancient hillside where the chalk white horse roams. As Halloween approaches, witches gather and Odin calls forth warriors. Only the mysterious Oona can soothe Sam’s grief, unveiling tarot secrets with her captivating presence. |
| The first move | Ireland, Jenny | Juliet believes girls like her – girls with arthritis – don’t get their own love stories. She plays online chess under a pseudonym. There, she isn’t just ‘the girl with crutches’. Ronan is the new kid: good looking, smart, a bad boy plagued by guilt over what happened to his brother. Chesslife is his escape. Juliet thinks Ronan thinks someone like Ronan could never be interested in someone like her – and she wouldn’t want him to be anyway – he always acts like he’s cooler than everyone else. Little do they know they’ve already discovered each other online, and have more in common than they think . . . |
| The stories grandma forgot (and how I found them) | Jassat, Nadine Aisha | Twelve-year-old Nyla’s dad died when she was four, or that’s what she’s been told.Grandma Farida insists she saw him in the supermarket, Nyla wonders if she is ‘time-travelling’ again – the phrase she uses when Grandma forgets. But when Grandma asks Nyla to find her dad and bring him home, Nyla promises that she will. As Nyla sets out on her journey, she hopes that uncovering the past will help her to understand the mystery at the heart of her family … and to work out who she is. |
| As long as the lemon trees grow | Katouh, Zoulfa | A year ago, before the revolution, Salama watched her brother marry her best friend, Layla, and wondered when her own love story might begin. Now she works at the hospital – helping those she can, closing the eyes of those she can’t. Layla and her unborn baby are all Salama has left. Unless you count Khawf. But he’s a hallucination; a symptom of the horrors she’s seen. Every day he urges Salama to leave. Every day she refuses. |
| Steady for this | Lessore, Nathanael | Shaun (aka MC Growls) is ready to drop his best bars and smash the competition at Raptology. That way, he’s convinced Tanisha, his crush, will finally give him a chance. But when a livestream practice goes epically wrong, Growls’s dirty laundry is literally exposed. He’s finally achieved his dreams of going viral – not in the good way. |
| You think you know me | Mohamud, Ayaan | People like me are devils before we are angels. Hanan has always been good and quiet. She accepts her role as her school’s perfect Muslim poster girl. She ignores the racist bullies. A closed mouth is gold – it helps you get home in one piece. Then her friend is murdered and every Muslim is to blame. The world is angry at us again. How can she stay silent while her family is ripped apart? It’s time for Hanan to stop being the quiet, good girl. It’s time for her to stand up and shout. |
| Delicious Monsters | Sambury, Liselle | This story follows two girls a decade apart, and their shared experiences in a remote mansion that is steeped with mystery. Daisy and her mother move to their family mansion after the passing of Daisy’s uncle. Daisy begins having disturbing experiences that make her question the history of the property and her mother’s story regarding it all.As Brittney investigates the mansion in the present, Daisy’s story runs parallel in the past, both timelines propelling the girls to face the most dangerous monsters of all: those that hide in plain sight. |
| 100 tales from the Tokyo Ghost Café | Sedgwick, Julian | Akira must make the long journey in north Japan to find his family and save his young sister, before time runs out. On his journey Akira and his companions encounter a host of yokai monsters and famous ghosts, discovering a sometimes comical and sometimes terrifying world of interlinked and ghostly short stories along the way |
| Ravencave | Sedgwick, Marcus | On holiday in Yorkshire, James is bored out of his mind being dragged around various old ruins as his dad tries to trace his family’s roots. Then one day as his parents bicker and his moody teenage brother ignores him, James hears mischievous laughter and the ghost of a young girl appears to him at Crackpot Hall. When she appears again after another argument between James and his brother, he goes after her, leading to a gruesome discovery that reveals a terrible truth about his family. |
| Friendship never ends | Sheppard, Alexandra | Sunita, Gifty, Dawn and May are about to have a summer they’ll never forget. Each girl spends their summer learning about first crushes, new friends, the strain of growing up and hopefully not growing apart, family ties, and their own ambition. |
| Happy Head | Silver, Josh | 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 the deeper into the programme he gets, the more disturbing the assessments become, until it’s clear there may be no escape… |
| The last whale | Vick, Chris | Abi, banned from her school for questionable IT use, heads to a remote Norwegian island with her grandma. Despite idyllic surroundings, the lack of WiFi hinders her eco-activism mission. Using a borrowed AI, she tracks whales crucial to Earth’s survival, but an incident puts her family at risk. Set across decades, this eco-thriller imagines a future where failing to address climate change imperils humanity, highlighting the importance of whale conservation across generations. |
| Vern, custodian of the universe | Waiters, Tyrell | Vern decides to return to his family in the Sunshine State, starting a new dead-end job as a custodian at a local science facility with a shady motive. Things aren’t entirely what they seem at Quasar, and when Vern accidentally plugs in a mysterious machine he finds himself standing on the brink of the destruction of every planet in the Multiverse. |
| What happens after midnight | Walther, K.L. | Lily Hopper has two more weeks until she’s officially finished with boarding school. With graduation quickly approaching Lily is worried that she’s somehow missed out on the fun of being in high school. So, when she receives a mysterious note inviting her to join the anonymous senior class Jester in executing the end-of-year prank, Lily sees her chance to put her goody-two-shoes reputation behind her. |
| Stars in their eyes | Walton, Jessica ; Aska | Maisie is on her way to Fancon where she will come face-to-face with her idol, Kara Bufano, fellow amputee and hardcore heroine of her favourite TV show. But when Maisie and her mum arrive at the convention centre, she is stopped in her tracks by Ollie, a cute volunteer working the show. They are kind, charming, and geek out about nerd culture just as much as Maisie does. And as the day wears on, Maisie’s heart swells with feelings for Ollie in ways that she’s never felt before. Is this what it feels like to fall in love? |
| Postcards from Valhalla | Weston, Danny | One morning, Viggo wakes to the news that his older brother, Magnus, has gone missing on Shetland. Viggo’s dad, Jonathan, went ‘off grid’ in the same location and disappeared 5 years ago.Viggo and his mother have no option but to go to Shetland – but from the moment they set off, he’s troubled by strange visions. As the search for Magnus begins, Viggo’s troubling visions start to intensify. Soon he is finding it difficult to separate fact from fantasy. |
| Bite Risk | Willis, S.J | When everyone’s a werewolf, it’s hard to spot the monster…One night a month when the full moon rises and kids like him must lock up their parents while they transform into werewolves. Strange things begin happening in the town and people are going missing. It’s up to Sel and his friends to what is happening, before it’s too late! |
