"A small note of hope ends this gripping but harsh tale. (Historical fiction. 15 & up)"
Coming from England, this bleak, violent, slang-inflected street saga exposes the machinations of power and villainy in Manchester's social services and criminal underworld.
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A fictional "novelist doing a journalist's job" maintains stunning suspense as he conducts interviews with the secondary players in a world-famous gruesome crime.
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"The point is that this, like sex, is all about good dirty fun. (Fiction. 12+)"
A trio of British teens fantasize, agonize, masturbate, grope, kiss, feel up, and shag their way through one seemingly endless school year in which traditional teen-novel concerns are entirely thrown over for sex.
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"Whether the device of the ghost truly moves beyond artifice is questionable—but the loveliness of the relationship between the young and the very old, and the very real meeting of the minds therein, is spot-on. (Fiction. 9-12)"
A bored boy finds diversion and danger in the ventilation ducts of his apartment building.
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Burgess won the Carnegie Medal for Smack (1998), his searing fiction about adolescent drug addiction, but his perhaps best-known work is the novel (made into the recent film) Billy Elliot.
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"It is that reader who must wonder and decide which side of the evolutionary fence to inhabit and therefore benefit from this intensely observed cautionary tale. (Fiction. YA)"
"Based on actual people and incidents, this harrowing tale is as compellingly real as it is tragic. (glossary) (Fiction. 13-16)"
In a Carnegie Medal—winning novel (under the UK title, Junk) that cuts to the bone, Burgess puts a group of teenage runaways through four nightmarish years of heroin addiction.
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"The giant, in her silent relationship with Amy, is a marvelous creation, and the story rockets to its exciting conclusion with a gleaming sense of otherworldliness. (Fiction. 8-12)"
A wonderfully cinematic adventure about a small girl and the giant she discovers under a tree, and the reuniting of that giant—only a child herself—with her parents.
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