Fifteen year olds Tasha and Josie are near-neighbours. But when their families let them down, they find themselves unlikely allies in a battle for survival. Josie s mum is saving the planet by collecting most of it, but her house is no longer safe for her own daughter. Tasha has all the clothes and kit a girl could want, but feels increasingly unnerved by her mother s new boyfriend. Both girls turn to each other for help when they find themselves on the brink of being made homeless. Behind Closed Doors examines what it means to love and be loved and how to make a life when there is no security at home.
Aman’s dad is gone, leaving her feeling lost and alone. She struggles to talk about it, but it’s a fact and he isn’t coming back. When a lovely man called Gurnam moves into her street and saves Aman from some local bullies, he and Aman quickly become friends, perhaps even like family. But Gurnam has his own sadness, one that’s far bigger than Aman can understand, and it’s tearing his life apart.
Why Comics? are the educational arm of Positive Negatives, an innovative organisation producing comics about current events and issues around the world, bringing together talented graphic artists and real-life testimony. Each comic is linked to resources you can use in the classroom, and can be a rich addition to your literacy, humanities or SMSC curriculum.
In the summer of 2014 a black plague swept across Syria, a killer cult spreading misery and murder. Sitting in the shade of the Pomegranate Tree, we meet Dilvan, a young Kurdish girl. Through the pages of her diary, we follow her quest to find her family with a determination to fight, maybe even to die – but never to surrender.
Dirk Lloyd, the Dark Lord trapped in the boy of a weedy schoolboy, returns in a darkly hilarious adventure set in the most ghoulish school you’ll encounter this side of the Darklands …
Fourth in the brilliant series that began with the Roald Dahl Funny Prize-winning DARK LORD: THE TEENAGE YEARS, also chosen as one of the Sunday Times’s 100 Modern Children Classics.
The children of Mivtown have grown up hearing the legend of the monsters of the loch. But it’s only a story – a warning to stay away from the water.
Then strange things start happening in the village. Effie’s rabbit Buster escapes from a locked hutch, her mum disappears without trace and slugs start to infest her home.
Along with her best friend Finn, Effie begins to hunt for clues to solve the mysteries of Mivtown. Could this all be connected to the legend? Is it really just a story or is there something lurking in those deep, dark waters?
At the end of the American Civil War, Charley – a young African-American slave from the deep south – is ostensibly freed. But then her adopted mother is raped and lynched at the hands of a mob and Charley is left alone. In a terrifyingly lawless land, where the colour of a person’s skin can bring violent death, Charley disguises herself as a man and joins the army. Soon she’s being sent to the prairies to fight a whole new war against the “savage Indians”. Trapped in a world of injustice and inequality, it’s only when Charley is posted to Apache territory that she begins to learn what it is to be truly free.
When Kenny drags Nicky out of bed one morning, Nicky has no idea that he is about to witness a terrible act of destruction, and the senseless killing of an innocent animal. But Nicky manages to save something precious from the disaster, and his and Kenny’s lives are changed forever…
Particularly suitable for struggling, reluctant and dyslexic readers of 12+
Born in Kent, in 1888, Walter Tull became not just the first black British professional outfield football player – for Tottenham Hotspur and Northampton Town – but also the first black officer in the British Army.
His leadership and courage in the trenches of the First World War won him a recommendation for a Military Cross that was never awarded because of his skin colour.
His story takes the reader from his childhood in an orphanage, through his footballing years, to his eventual tragic death, aged 29, on the Somme. His legacy lives on.
Dirk – according to his own account – is the earthly incarnation of a Dark Lord, supreme ruler of the Darklands and leader of great armies of orcs and warriors, intent on destruction and bloody devastation.
Following a colossal final battle between the forces of good and evil, the Dark Lord was defeated and hurled by his arch-foe’s spells into the Pit of Uttermost Despair. At the bottom of the Pit lies… a supermarket car park in the municipal town of Whiteshields, somewhere in modern day England.
And when he is found, and tries to explain that he is the Dark Lord, people think he means Dirk Lloyd. The fact that he’s trapped in the puny body of a schoolboy doesn’t help.
