Episodes
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Am I Normal Yet?
By Holly Bourne
Read by Charlie Sanderson
First book of The Spinster Club series
All Evie wants is to be normal. And now that she's almost off her meds and at a new college where no one knows her as ‘the-girl-who-went-nuts,’ there's only one thing left to tick off her list... a boyfriend. But relationships can mess with anyone's head - something Evie's new friends Amber and Lottie know only too well. The trouble is, if Evie won't tell them her secrets, how can they stop her making a huge mistake? -
The Lie Tree
By Frances Hardinge
Read by Emilia Fox
Winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2015.
The Lie Tree is a wonderfully evocative and atmospheric novel by Frances Hardinge, award-winning author of Cuckoo Song and Fly By Night.
Faith's father has been found dead under mysterious circumstances, and as she is searching through his belongings for clues she discovers a strange tree. The tree only grows healthy and bears fruit if you whisper a lie to it. The fruit of the tree, when eaten, will deliver a hidden truth to the person who consumes it. The bigger the lie, the more people who believe it, the bigger the truth that is uncovered.
The girl realizes that she is good at lying and that the tree might hold the key to her father's murder, so she begins to spread untruths far and wide across her small island community. But as her tales spiral out of control, she discovers that where lies seduce, truths shatter . . . -
Missing episodes?
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A Monster Calls
By Patrick Ness
Based on an original idea by Siobhan Dowd
Read by Jason Isaacs
Costa Award winner and Guardian Prize winning author, Patrick Ness delivers an extraordinarily moving novel about coming to terms with loss.
The monster showed up after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments, the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming…
This monster is something different though. Something ancient, something wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor.
It wants the truth. -
The Hunger Games
By Suzanne Collins
Read by Carolyn McCormick
First in the ground-breaking Hunger Games trilogy.
Set in a dark vision of the near future, a terrifying reality TV show is taking place. Twelve boys and twelve girls are forced to appear in a live event called The Hunger Games. There is only one rule: kill or be killed. When sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen steps forward to take her younger sister's place in the games, she sees it as a death sentence. But Katniss has been close to death before. For her, survival is second nature. -
Maggot Moon
By Sally Gardner
Read by Robert Madge
A starkly original and heartbreaking tale of friendship and rebellion
Winner of the Carnegie Medal and a 2012 Costa Award winner. Narrated against the backdrop of a ruthless regime determined to beat its enemies in the race to the moon, MAGGOT MOON is a starkly and heartbreaking tale of friendship and rebellion from award-winning author, Sally Gardner. -
Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
By Cassandra Clare
Read by Ari Graynor
Clary Fray is seeing things: vampires in Brooklyn and werewolves in Manhattan. Irresistably drawn towards a group of sexy demon hunters, Clary encounters the dark side of New York City – and the dangers of forbidden love. -
CHERUB: The Recruit
By Robert Muchamore
Read by Simon Scardifield
A terrorist doesn't let strangers in her flat because they might be undercover police or intelligence agents, but her children bring their mates home and they run all over the place.
The terrorist doesn't know that a kid has bugged every room in her house, cloned the hard drive on her PC, and copied all the numbers in her phone book. The kid works for CHERUB.
CHERUB agents are aged between ten and seventeen. They live in the real world, slipping under adult radar and getting information that sends criminals and terrorists to jail. -
Geek Girl
By Holly Smale
Read by Kate Sobey
“My name is Harriet Manners, and I am a geek.”
Harriet Manners knows that a cat has 32 muscles in each ear, a “jiffy” lasts 1/100th of a second, and the average person laughs 15 times per day. She knows that bats always turn left when exiting a cave and that peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
But she doesn’t know why nobody at school seems to like her.
So when Harriet is spotted by a top model agent, she grabs the chance to reinvent herself. Even if it means stealing her best friend’s dream, incurring the wrath of her arch enemy Alexa, and repeatedly humiliating herself in front of impossibly handsome model Nick. Even if it means lying to the people she loves.
Veering from one couture disaster to the next with the help of her overly enthusiastic father and her uber-geeky stalker, Toby, Harriet begins to realise that the world of fashion doesn’t seem to like her any more than the real world did.
As her old life starts to fall apart, will Harriet be able to transform herself before she ruins everything? -
Half Bad
By Sally Green
Read by Carl Prekopp
A debut novel about one boy's struggle for survival in a hidden society of witches. You can't read, can't write, but you heal fast, even for a witch. You get sick if you stay indoors after dark. You hate White Witches but love Annalise, who is one. You've been kept in a cage since you were fourteen. All you've got to do is escape and find Mercury, the Black Witch who eats boys. And do that before your seventeenth birthday. Easy. Sally Green lives in north-west England. She has had jobs (paid and unpaid) and even a profession but at last has found the time to write down the stories she used to only be able to daydream about. She likes to read, walk in the country and would like to drink less coffee. -
How I Live Now
By Meg Rossoff
Read by Amber Sealey
Meg Rosoff's charming coming-of-age novel, How I Live Now is set over a summer of love and destruction.
American girl Daisy has had a troubled background, and is sent from New York to stay with her charmingly shambolic family of British cousins, who she has never met. They are Isaac, Edmond, Osbert, and Piper. And two dogs and a goat. Daisy has never met anyone quite like them before and, as a dreamy English summer progresses, Daisy finds herself caught in a timeless bubble as she slowly begins to piece herself together with the the help of her super-eccentric and slightly psychic cousins. Not only does Daisy get better as she easily succumbs to the charms of their adult-free rural home, but she finds herself falling in love with one of her cousins in this intense, gorgeous, summery bubble where they live a timeless existence. So timeless, that when war breaks out they barely seem to notice.... Daisy's life is changed forever and the world is too. -
Noughts and Crosses
By Malorie Blackman
Read by Paul Chequer
Sephy is a Cross - a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a nought - a 'colourless' member of the underclass who were once slaves to the Crosses. The two have been friends since early childhood. But that's as far as it can go. Until the first steps are taken towards more social equality and a limited number of Noughts are allowed into Cross schools... Against a background of prejudice and distrust, intensely highlighted by violent terrorist activity by Noughts, a romance builds between Sephy and Callum - a romance that is to lead both of them into terrible danger... -
The Bolds
By Julian Clary
Read by Julian Clary
Mr and Mrs Bold are just like you and me: they live in a nice house, they have jobs and they love to have a giggle. One slight difference: they're hyenas. That's right - covered in fur, tails tucked into their trousers, and they really like to laugh. So far, the Bolds have managed to keep things under wraps.. But the nosy man next door smells a rat, could this be the end of Teddington's best-kept secret?
Nominated for the CILIP Greenaway Medal 2016 -
Rooftoppers
By Katherine Rundell
Read by Gordon Griffin
Winner of the Blue Peter Book Award and the Waterstones Children's Book Prize, Rooftoppers is a charming novel.
Everyone thinks that Sophie is an orphan. Found floating in a cello case, she is the only recorded female survivor of a shipwreck on the English Channel. But Sophie remembers seeing her mother wave for help… When the child welfare agency threatens to send Sophie to an orphanage, Sophie and her guardian flee to Paris to find her mother, starting with the only clue she has - the address of the cello maker. -
How to Train Your Dragon
By Cressida Cowell
Read by David Tennant
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, was a truly extraordinary Viking Hero. Warrior chieftain, awesome sword-fighter and amateur naturalist, he was known throughout Vikingdom as 'the Dragon Whisperer', on account of his amazing power over these terrifying beasts.
But it wasn't always like that. In fact, in the beginning, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III was the most put upon Viking you'd ever seen. Not loud enough to make himself heard at dinner with his father, Stoick the Vast; not hard enough to beat his chief rival, Snotlout, at Bashyball, the number one school sport and CERTAINLY not stupid enough to go into a cave full of dragons to find a pet ... -
Darcy Burdock
By Laura Dockrill
Read by Laura Dockrill
Ten-year-old Darcy Burdock is one of life's noticers. Curious, smart-as-a-whip, funny and fiercely loyal, she sees the extraordinary in the everyday and the wonder in the world around her.
In this first book, we are introduced to her family: Mum, who Darcy loves as much as her favourite fried egg and chips, Dad, who is kind and fair if a bit hopeless, and little siblings Hector and Poppy, who Darcy likes dressing up in ridiculous outfits and having dance-offs with, respectively. Plus there's her non-bleating pet lamb, Lamb-Beth and best friend, Will, to have adventures with.
Darcy learns that turning into an angrosaurus-rex and causing chaos just gets her in trouble, trying to run away from home with a reluctant lamb in tow leads to sore kneebows, it's best not to throw a massive strop just before your surprise birthday party, Hallowe'en is all about spider costumes and having a pumpkin with a wonky eye, and if she's ever in a situation at home or at school where she's not sure what to do, she should write a story around it and the truth will be illuminated by her imagination. -
Grandpa's Great Escape
By David Walliams
Read by David Walliams & Michael Gambon
Jack’s Grandpa…
*Wears his slippers to the supermarket
*Serves up Spam a la Custard for dinner
*and often doesn’t remember Jack’s name
But he can still take to the skies in a speeding Spitfire and save the day…
An exquisite portrait of the bond between a small boy and his beloved Grandpa – this book takes readers on an incredible journey wit Spitfires over London and Great Escapes through the city in a high octane adventure full of comedy and heart. -
Murder Most Unladylike
By Robin Stevens
Read by Gemma Chan
When Daisy Wells and Hazel Wong set up their very own secret detective agency at Deepdean School for Girls, they struggle to find any truly exciting mysteries to investigate. (Unless you count the case of Lavinia's missing tie. Which they don't.) Then Hazel discovers the Science Mistress, Miss Bell, lying dead in the gym. She assumes it was a terrible accident - but when she and Daisy return five minutes later, the body has disappeared. Now Hazel and Daisy not only have a murder to solve; they have to prove one happened in the first place. Determined to get to the bottom of the crime before the killer strikes again (and before the police can get there first, naturally), Hazel and Daisy must hunt for evidence, spy on their suspects and use all the cunning and intuition they can muster. But will they succeed? And can their friendship stand the test? -
Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief
By Rick Riordan
Read by Jesse Bernstein
"Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood. I never asked to be the son of a Greek God. I was just a normal kid, going to school, playing basketball, skateboarding. The usual. Until I accidentally vaporized my maths teacher. That's when things started really going wrong. Now I spend my time fighting with swords, battling monsters with my friends, and generally trying to stay alive. This is the one where Zeus, God of the Sky, thinks I've stolen his lightning bolt - and making Zeus angry is a very bad idea."
Can Percy find the lightning bolt before a fully-fledged war of the Gods erupts? -
George's Marvellous Medicine
By Roald Dahl
Read by Derek Jacobi
George Kranky is eight years old and wondering what sort of mischief he might get into. George's Grandma is a grizzly old grouch and George wants to teach her a lesson.... And when Grandma's finished drinking George's marvellous medicine, she'll really have something to grumble about. -
Skellig
By David Almond
Read by David Almond
When a move to a new house coincides with his baby sister's illness, Michael's world seems suddenly lonely and uncertain.
Then, one Sunday afternoon, he stumbles into the old, ramshackle garage of his new home, and finds something magical. A strange creature - part owl, part angel, a being who needs Michael's help if he is to survive. With his new friend Mina, Michael nourishes Skellig back to health, while his baby sister languishes in the hospital.
But Skellig is far more than he at first appears, and as he helps Michael breathe life into his tiny sister, Michael's world changes for ever . . . - Show more
