Challenging Reads
Created on 08/03/2017
All books listed are available from the school library.
Books highlighted in blue are adult novels and therefore contain adult
material.
Crime
Black Rabbit Summer
Death on the Nile
The Body in the Library
Murder on the Orient Express
Kevin Brooks
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Hate
The Lie Tree
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alan Gibbons
Frances Hardinge
Pigeon English
Hello Darkness
The Penalty
Akinyi
Stephen Kelman
Anthony McGowan
Mal Peet
Richard Wood
Mysteries and Thrillers
Down to the Wire
Desert Crossing
The Da Vinci Code
Digital Fortress
Bernard Ashley
Elise Broach
Dan Brown
Dan Brown
The Lost and Found
The Messenger Bird
The Firm
Young Bond Series
Cat Clarke
Ruth Eastham
John Grisham
Charlie Higson
The Bourne Trilogy
HIVE
The Boy in the Burning House
The Unknown Assassin Series
Robert Ludlum
Mark Walden
Tim Wynne-Jones
Allen Zadoff
Science fiction
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Lifegame
Star Wars Jedi Search
Escape from Genopolis
Douglas Adams
Alison Allen-Gray
Kevin J Anderson
T E Berry-Hart
Sorrowline
The Tomorrow Seed
Enders Game
The Selection Series
Niel Bushell
Andrew Butcher
Orson Scott Card
Kiera Cass
Jurassic Park
The Maze Runner Series
Gone Series
Legend Series
Michael Crichton
James Dashner
Michael Grant
Marie Lu
Chaos Walking Trilogy
How I Live Now
Divergent Series
War of the Worlds
Patrick Ness
Meg Rosoff
Veronica Roth
H G Wells
The Day of the Triffids
The 5th Wave
John Wyndham
Rick Yancey
Fantasy/Adventure
Rebel
Apocalypse
Shannara Series
The Book of Lost Things
R J Anderson
Tim Bowler
Terry Brooks
John Connolly
The Mortal Instruments Trilogy
The Infernal Devices Series
The Black Tattoo
Hush Hush Series
Cassandra Clare
Cassandra Clare
Sam Enthoven
Becca Fitzpatrick
Reckless
Inkheart Trilogy
Cuckoo’s Song
Seraphina
Cornelia Funke
Cornelia Funke
Frances Hardinge
Rachel Hartman
Life of Pi
Eragon
Discworld Series
His Dark Materials Trilogy
Yan Martel
Christopher Paolini
Terry Pratchett
Philip Pullman
Magnus Chase Series
Rick Riordan
The Hobbit/The Lord of the Rings Trilogy J R R Tolkien
Witchfinder
Ruth Warburton
Horror
Sookie Sackhouse Series
(True Blood TV series)
The Enemy Series
Charlaine Harris
The Woman in Black
Mister Creecher
Asylum
Susan Hill
Chris Priestly
Madeleine Roux
My Swordhand is Singing
Frankenstein
The Woman in Black
Marcus Sedgwick
Mary Shelly
Susan Hill
Charlie Higson
War
Little Soldier
Broken Bridge
Regeneration
Bernard Ashley
Lynne Reid Banks
Pat Barker
Remembrance
Henderson Boys Series
Tamer
Theresa Breslin
Robert Muchamore
Mal Peet
The Eagle Trail
Battleground
Last Train from Kummersdorf
The Book Thief
Robert Rigby
Chris Ryan
Leslie Wilson
Markus Zusak
Historical
Company of Liars (The Plague)
Eagle of the Ninth (Roman Britain)
Apache (Native Americans 1800s America)
Karen Maitland
Rosemary Sutcliff
Tanya Landman
Livinia (Ancient Greece)
The Medici Curse (Renaissance Italy)
The Clan of the Cave Bear (Prehistory)
Ursula le Guin
Matt Chamings
Jean M Auel
The Foreshadowing (Ancient History and WW1)
Witch Child/Sorceress
Marcus Sedgwick
Celia Rees
(Early American History 1600s)
Buffalo Soldier (American Civil War)
Tanya Landman
Lies We Tell Ourselves
A Painted House (1950’s American Cotton fields)
Ghost Hawk (Native Americans 1660s America)
Robin Talley
John Grisham
Susan Cooper
The Titan Prophecy (Ancient History)
Anila’s Journey (18th century India)
A.M Crawford
Mary Finn
(1950s America – civil rights movement)
Real life issues/themes
Thirteen Reasons Why
Junk
Breaktime
Jay Asher
Melvin Burgess
Aidan Chambers
The Year of the Rat
Paper Towns
Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Wonder
Clare Furniss
John Green
John Green & David Levithan
R J Palacio
Second Glance
My Sisters Keeper
(Un)arranged Marriage
Forbidden
Jodi Picoult
Jodi Picoult
Bali Rai
Tabitha Suzma
General fiction
Noughts and Crosses Series
The Alchemist
A Gathering Light
Malorie Blackman
Paulo Coelho
Jennifer Donnelly
Fever Pitch
Playing with Fire
Holes
Slumdog Millionaire
Nick Hornby
Henning Mankell
Louis Sachar
Vikas Swarup
Classics
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Jane Austen
Charlotte Bronte
Emily Bronte
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Woman in White
Truman Capote
Arthur C Clarke
Wilkie Collins
Robinson Crusoe
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Great Gatsby
Catch 22
Daniel Defoe
Alexandre Dumas
F Scott Fitzgerald
Joseph Heller
The Outsiders
Cider House Rules
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
On the Road
S E Hinton
John Irving
Ken Kesey
Jack Kerouac
The Call of the Wild
The Catcher in the Rye
Treasure Island
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Jack London
J D Salinger
Robert Louis Stevenson
Mark Twain
Brideshead Revisited
The Jeeves Omnibus
To the Lighthouse
Evelyn Waugh
P G Wodehouse
Virgina Woolf
Autobiography/Biography/Factual
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
My Side
Business Stripped Bare:
Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur
Maya Angelou
David Beckham
Richard Branson
Notes from a Small Island
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Trump Revealed
Bill Bryson
Bill Bryson
Michael Kranish & Marc Fisher
Gerrard
The Innocent Man
Dreams from My Father
Steven Gerrard
John Grisham
Barack Obama
Foley: The Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit
(part autobiography, part fiction)
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
I am Malala
Michael Smith
Jeanette Winterson
Jeanette Winterson
Malala Yousafzai
Other books we don’t have in the school
library but you may also enjoy:
Band of Brothers By Stephen E. Ambrose
An account of Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army during WW2,
drawing on hours of interviews with survivors as well as the soldiers' journals
and letters.
Farenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury
Set in a not-too-distant future where books are burned by a special task
force of firemen. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which
are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so,
Montag is unhappy. Are books hidden in his house?
The Hunt for Red October By Tom Clancy
Russia’s ultra-secret missile submarine, the Red October, is heading west. The
Americans want her. The Russians want her back. With all-out war only
seconds away, the superpowers race across the ocean on the most desperate
mission of a lifetime.
Rena’s Promise: A story of sisters in Auschwitz By Rena
Kornreich Gelissen
The remarkable story of Rena Korneich, one of the few women who
survived the first Jewish transport to Auschwitz along with her sister and
how they fought to survive.
Roots By Alex Haley
Tracing his ancestry through six generations – slaves and freedmen, farmers
and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects – back to Africa, Alex Haley
discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte. It was this young man,
who had been torn from his homeland and brought to the slave markets of
the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.
The Stand By Stephen King
When a man crashes his car into a petrol station, he brings with him the foul
corpses of his wife and daughter. When he too dies, it doesn't take long for
the plague which killed him to spread across America and the world. A horror
masterpiece.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold By John le Carre
From the master of spy thrillers, this is a gripping story of love and
betrayal at the height of the Cold War.
Go Set a Watchman By Harper Lee
When 26 year old Scout returns home to visit her ageing father Atticus she
learns a disturbing truth about her close-knit family in this sequel of To Kill a
Mockingbird
Jamaica Inn by Daphne Du Maurier
A classic gothic novel set on the windswept Cornish Moors where a young
Mary Yellen is unwillingly dragged into a dangerous world of smuggling
and murder in her Uncle’s Inn.
All Quiet on the Western Front By Erich Maria Remarque
In 1914 a room full of German schoolboys, are goaded by their schoolmaster
to troop off to the 'glorious war'. What follows is the moving story of a young
'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the
trenches.