21st March 2025


Our expert


Charlotte Eyre Charlotte is the children’s previewer at The Bookseller and has been involved in judging several book prizes, including the Costa Book Awards, The Week Junior Book Awards and the British Book Awards. She was children’s editor of The Bookseller for nine years and founded the YA Book Prize in 2014.


Children’s Previews June


Previews


Publishers go down the rabbit hole


The 160th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland means new editions and spin-offs aplenty, plus it is a strong month for YA fiction


J 10


une is shaping up to be a stupendous month for books for teenagers, and my Top 10 titles could have been made


up of YA novels alone. As well as the four I have highlighted, Augmented (Faber) by Kenechi Udogu, The Goldens (HarperFire) by Lauren Wilson, Kill Creatures (Scholastic) by Rory Power and Lauryn Hamilton Murray’s Heir of Storms (Penguin), my book of the month, there were also excellent novels from JL Simmonds and Caroline O’Donoghue. O’Donoghue’s Skipshock (Walker


Books) is an original and very clever time-bending SF romance, while Simmonds’ debut Run Away with Me (Penguin) is a Thelma & Louise- esque sapphic romance about two girls who embark on an epic road


trip across the US. And I really enjoyed Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian (Little Tiger), which is a historical drama set in New York during the AIDS crisis. There is also a new novel coming from Elle McNicoll, Wish You Were Her (Pan Macmillan), once again providing much needed neurodi- versity representation in YA. In middle-grade, Phil Earle’s


The Dawn of Adonis (Andersen) and Peter Burns’ Shadow Thieves (Farshore) – both in the Top 10 – will be eagerly anticipated by readers. Janice Hallett is moving into this space with her first children’s book, A Box Full of Murders (PRH), which entices the reader to try and solve the mystery themselves. Poet Mike Edwards makes his


children’s debut with Riverskin, a fantastical story about rivers,


Books Children’s Previews


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