The Current - authors A to B

The True Tale of the Monster Billy Dean

David Almond

Billy Dean grows up hidden from the world, confined only to one small room. When his father disappears Billy’s mum brings him out into the world and he learns the truth about the awful happenings on the day he was born, events convincing his father that Billy is marked out for a special fate. With the world now consumed by war, Billy discovers a talent for helping to heal and rebuild, although there is still one figure beyond helping who now comes looking for Billy and a day of reckoning.

9780141332048 Puffin 2011

Starcrossed

Josephine Angelini

16 year old Helen has always known she’s different – it’s those hallucinations of three women weeping blood – but she doesn’t know how different until she meets Lucas, a kindred soul. She falls for him and he awakens her startling powers as they battle the three Furies from Greek mythology in modern day Nantucket. Haunting and romantic.

9780330529730 Macmillan 2011

August

Bernard Beckett

Tristan and Grace are two strangers trapped upside down in a car wreck facing death. What an opening!

Through flashbacks we are told about their recent lives and how they came to be in the car together. Tristan is from a closed religious sect so his views on life and death are very different from Grace’s. Fast paced and thought provoking.

9780857387899 Quercus 2011

You

Charles Benoit

Written unusually in the second person so you feel in the middle of the action this is the story of Kyle, an aimlessly drifting teenager. He makes some bad choices as he loses his friends when he chooses to go to a less academic school where he doesn’t have to work hard. Things take a terrible turn when he joins up with the wrong crowd and gets involved in a murder.

9780061947049 HarperCollins 2010

Naked

Kevin Brooks

Welcome to London, punk and the summer of 1976. When 16 year-old Lili is given a bass guitar by wild and rebellious Curtis, she joins his band, Naked, and dives headlong into the rock dream. Already more than mere band-mates, things get complicated when Lili and Curtis are joined by the mysterious Belfast boy Billy the Kid. Lili comes to see Billy’s calm strength as a more appealing alternative to Curtis’s drug fuelled anarchy. A furiously paced exploration of life, love and the punk inferno.

9780141326115 Penguin 2011

Kill All Enemies

Melvin Burgess

Meet Billie, Chris and Rob, three teenagers expelled from school who find temporary refuge in a local Pupil Referral Unit. All three have been let down by people they should be able to trust: Billie has been kicked out of home, Chris has refused to do any homework for years, and Rob is bullied by his stepfather. There are glimmers of light for the trio however, particularly from understanding social worker Hannah, and Jim, the unorthodox teacher in charge of the referral unit. A hard hitting, emotional rollercoaster.

9780141335643 Penguin 2011