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The Black Crow Conspiracy
by Christopher Edge

It's 1902. London is looking forward to the new King's coronation and ignoring the threat of war from across the sea...Penelope Tredwell, the pen behind bestselling author, Montgomery Flinch, is cursed with writer's block. She needs a sensational new story or her magazine, The Penny Dreadful, will go under. So when a mysterious letter arrives, confessing to an impossible crime, Penny thinks she has found a plot to enthrall her readers: the theft of the Crown Jewels by the diabolical Black Crow. Ghostly apparitions, kidnap and treason - this is the stuff of great stories. But what if it's all true?

Fiction to Challenge Years 5 & 6

Dragon Orb: Firestorm
by Mark Robson

Dragon's in Areth each have a single predestined rider and a single life mission, given to them by the Oracle. But this once all-powerful being is now fatally damaged and fading fast... Only the dragons and their riders can save it! 

Nolita is terrified of dragons! Learning to fly her day dragon would be dangerous enough without irrational fears to contend with and a vicious dragon-hunter on her tail. With Elian, another novice rider, Nolita seeks the first of four Orbs, whose combined power can restore the Oracle. Only Nolita, as a day dragon rider, can claim it. To do so, she must face her worst fears, and face them alone...

Sabriel
by Garth Nix

Who will guard the living when the dead arise?

Sabriel is sent as a child across the Wall to the safety of a school in Ancelstierre. Away from magic; away from the Dead. After receiving a cryptic message from her father, 18-year-old Sabriel leaves her ordinary school and returns across the Wall into the Old Kingdom. Fraught with peril and deadly trickery, her journey takes her to a world filled with parasitical spirits, Mordicants, and Shadow Hands – for her father is none other than The Abhorson. His task is to lay the disturbed dead back to rest. This obliges him – and now Sabriel, who has taken on her father's title and duties – to slip over the border into the icy river of Death, sometimes battling the evil forces that lurk there, waiting for an opportunity to escape into the realm of the living. Desperate to find her father, and grimly determined to help save the Old Kingdom from destruction by the horrible forces of the evil undead, Sabriel endures almost impossible challenges whilst discovering her own supernatural abilities – and her destiny.

Remembrance
by Theresa Breslin

Scotland, 1915. A group of teenagers from two families meet for a picnic, but the war across the Channel is soon to tear them away from such youthful pleasures. All too soon, the horror of what is to become known as The Great War engulfs them, their friends and the whole village. From the horror of the trenches, to the devastating reality seen daily by those nursing the wounded, they struggle to survive - and nothing will ever be the same again. 

Dot Robot
by Jason Bradbury

'Congratulations, Jackson. Welcome to MeX.'

 

Dot.com billionaire Devlin Lear, founder of the top-secret defence force MeX, has been watching Jackson Farley. He knows he has found a digital genius.

 

Along with three other brilliant gamers from different corners of the world, Lear needs Jackson to join him and stop the criminal heist of the century. And all by the power of the most highly advanced, state-of-the-art robots ever invented.

 

Are Jackson and the MeX recruits as good as Lear thinks? And how does Jackson know quite who to trust when they can never meet face-to-face?

Larklight
by Philip Reeve

Arthur (Art) Mumby and his irritating sister Myrtle live with their father in the huge and rambling house, Larklight, travelling through space on a remote orbit far beyond the Moon. One ordinary sort of morning they receive a correspondence informing them that a gentleman is on his way to visit, a Mr Webster. Visitors to Larklight are rare if not unique, and a frenzy of preparation ensues. But it is entirely the wrong sort of preparation, as they discover when their guest arrives, and a Dreadful and Terrifying (and Marvellous) adventure begins. It takes them to the furthest reaches of Known Space, where they must battle the evil First Ones in a desperate attempt to save each other - and the Universe. Recounted through the eyes of Art himself, Larklight is sumptuously designed and illustrated throughout.

Pure Dead Brilliant
by Debi Gliori 

There's trouble brewing at StregaSchloss! When Signora Strega-Borgia invites some would-be witches to stay, weird things begin to happen. Pandora can't resist the temptation of time travel - and Titus picks up a strange and deadly computer virus. Are they falling under the witches' spell? Or is the ghost of the Strega-Borgias' past coming back to haunt them all?

Montmorency
by Eleanor Updale

1875: When an ambitious young doctor rescues a scruffy thief on the point of death, he inadvertently creates Montmorency – whose life is split between the new London sewers and Victorian high society. This is the first book in the Montmorency series.

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