Best of April

These are our Teen recommends at the front of our store! 

We update this bay as we get new titles we love in, so before we change for May, we wanted to show you what our best sellers were over April and the books that we've really loved. They follow across the top shelf downward, left to right. (We've excluded John Green because it's John Green - no blurb necessary!)

Click through to find out more about the books.

If You Find Me - Emily Murdoch

What happens in the woods, stays in the woods...Carey is keeping a terrible secret. If she tells, it could destroy her future. If she doesn't, will she ever be free? For almost as long as she can remember, Carey has lived in a camper van in the heart of the woods with her drug-addicted mother and six-year-old sister, Jenessa. Her mother routinely disappears for weeks at a time, leaving the girls to cope alone. Survival is Carey's only priority - until strangers arrive and everything changes.

The School For Good and Evil - Soman Chainani

A dark and enchanting fantasy adventure perfect for girls who prefer their fairytales with a twist. Every four years, two girls are kidnapped from the village of Gavaldon. Legend has it these lost children are sent to the School for Good and Evil, the fabled institution where they become fairytale heroes or villains. Sophie, the most beautiful girl in town, has always dreamed of her place at the School for Good while her friend Agatha, with her dark disposition seems destined for the School for Evil. But when the two are kidnapped they find their fortunes reversed...

Out of the Easy - Ruta Sepetys

Josie Moraine wants out of The Big Easy - she needs more than New Orleans can offer. Known locally as a brothel prostitute's daughter, she dreams of life at an elite college, far away from here. But then a mysterious death in the Quarter leaves Josie caught between her ambition and a clandestine underworld. New Orleans is luring Josie deeper in as she searches for the truth, and temptation beckons at every turn.

Butter - Erin Lange

I can't take another year in this fat suit, but I can end this year with a bang. If you can stomach it, you're invited to watch ...as I eat myself to death. -Butter. Prepare to gasp, laugh and cry at one boy's journey from lonely outcast to toast of the school as he nears his dreadful deadline...

Dead Ends - Erin Lange

Dane Washington and Billy D couldn't be more different. Dane is clever and popular, but he's also a violent rebel. Billy D has Down's Syndrome, plays by the rules and hangs out with teachers in his lunch break. But Dane and Billy have more in common than they think - both their fathers are missing. Maybe they'll just have to suck up their differences and get on with helping each other find some answers. Powerful, funny, moving - the ultimate coming-of-age novel.
Read our review of Dead Ends.

The Year of the Rat - Claire Furniss

I always thought you'd know, somehow, if something terrible was going to happen. I thought you'd sense it, like when the air goes damp and heavy before a storm and you know you'd better hide yourself away somewhere safe until it all blows over. But it turns out it's not like that at all. There's no scary music playing in the background like in films. No warning signs. Not even a lonely magpie. One for sorrow, Mum used to say. Quick, look for another. The world can tip at any moment … a fact that fifteen-year-old Pearl is all too aware of when her mum dies after giving birth to her baby sister. Told across the year following her mother's death, Pearl's story is full of bittersweet humour and heartbreaking honesty about how you deal with grief that cuts you to the bone, as she tries not only to come to terms with losing her mum, but also the fact that her sister - The Rat - is a constant reminder of why her mum is no longer around…
Read our review of The Year of the Rat.

Tape - Steven Camden

Told with crackling prose, shimmering with humour and deeply moving, it will haunt anyone who reads it...Record a voice and it lasts forever...In 1993, Ryan records a diary on an old tape. He talks about his mother's death, about his dreams, about his love for a new girl at school who doesn't even know he exists. In 2013, Ameliah moves in with her grandmother after her parents die. There, she finds a tape in the spare room. A tape with a boy's voice on it - a voice she can't quite hear, but which seems to be speaking to her. Ryan and Ameliah are connected by more than just a tape. This is their story.

Read our review of Tape.

More Than This - Patrick Ness

From two-time Carnegie Medal winner Patrick Ness comes an enthralling and provocative new novel chronicling the life - or perhaps afterlife - of a teen trapped in a crumbling, abandoned world. A boy called Seth drowns, desperate and alone in his final moments, losing his life as the pounding sea claims him. But then he wakes. He is naked, thirsty, starving. But alive. How is that possible? He remembers dying, his bones breaking, his skull dashed upon the rocks. So how is he is here? And where is this place? It looks like the suburban English town where he lived as a child, before an unthinkable tragedy happened and his family moved to America. But the neighbourhood around his old house is overgrown, covered in dust and completely abandoned. What's going on? And why is it that whenever he closes his eyes, he falls prey to vivid, agonizing memories that seem more real than the world around him? Seth begins a search for answers, hoping that he might not be alone, that this might not be the hell he fears it to be, that there might be more than just this...

Divergent Series - Veronica Roth

The hugely popular dystopian series made up of Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant. For sixteen-year-old Tris, the world changes in a heartbeat when she is forced to make a terrible choice. Turning her back on her family, Tris ventures out, alone, determined to find out where she truly belongs. Shocked by the brutality of her new life, Tris can trust no one. And yet she is drawn to a boy who seems to both threaten and protect her. The hardest choices may yet lie ahead...

Geek Girl - Holly Smale

"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?
Read our review of Geek Girl.

Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell

Cath and Wren are identical twins, and until recently they did absolutely everything together. Now they're off to university and Wren's decided she doesn't want to be one half of a pair any more - she wants to dance, meet boys, go to parties and let loose. It's not so easy for Cath. She's horribly shy and has always buried herself in the fan fiction she writes, where she always knows exactly what to say and can write a romance far more intense than anything she's experienced in real life. Without Wren Cath is completely on her own and totally outside her comfort zone. She's got a surly room-mate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words ...And she can't stop worrying about her dad, who's loving and fragile and has never really been alone. Now Cath has to decide whether she's ready to open her heart to new people and new experiences, and she's realizing that there's more to learn about love than she ever thought possible
Read a customer's review of Fangirl.

Charm and Strange - Stephanie Kuhne

'Don't. Please don't say my name. You have no idea who I really am.' No one really knows who Andrew Winston Winters is. Least of all himself. He is part Win, a lonely teenager exiled to a remote boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy. The guy who shuts the whole world out, no matter the cost, because his darkest fear is of himself ...of the wolfish predator within. But he's also part Drew, the angry boy with violent impulses that control him. The boy who, one fateful summer, was part of something so terrible it came close to destroying him. Fans of Meg Rosoff, Kevin Brooks or Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin will be gripped by this story, but it is unlike anything you have ever read before. The pace, tension and raw emotion within this books for teens is almost palpable. Charm and Strange is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the final page.
Read our review of Charm and Strange.

Half Bad - Sally Green

The breathtaking 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.
Read our review of Half Bad.

The Maze Runner - James Dashner

When the doors of the lift crank open, the only thing Thomas remembers is his first name. But he's not alone. He's surrounded by boys who welcome him to the Glade - a walled encampment at the centre of a bizarre and terrible stone maze. Like Thomas, the Gladers don't know why or how they came to be there \- or what's happened to the world outside. All they know is that every morning when the walls slide back, they will risk everything \- even the Grievers, half-machine, half-animal horror that patrol its corridors, to try and find out.

The 5th Wave - Rick Yancey

THE 1st WAVE

Took out half a million people.

THE 2nd WAVE

Put that number to shame.

THE 3rd WAVE

Lasted a little longer. Twelve weeks . . . Four billion dead.

IN THE 4th WAVE,

You can't trust that people are still people.

AND THE 5th WAVE?

No one knows.

But it's coming.

On a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs. Runs from the beings that only look human, who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan may be her only hope.

Now Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.