What to read this Spring

How to be Luminous is a heart-wrenching story about the aftermath of tragedy and the power of self-belief and love. Harriet Reuter Hapgood's beautiful writing radiates with colour.

When seventeen-year-old Minnie Sloe's mother disappears, so does her ability to see colour. How can young artist Minnie create when all she sees is black-and-white? Will her mysterious ailment – and grief – stop her from following in her mother's footsteps and becoming a famous artist?

Middle child Minnie and her two sisters have always been able to get through anything together – growing up without fathers, living the eccentric artist lifestyle, and riding out their mother's mental highs and lows. But losing their mother irrevocably breaks them, and Minnie wonders if she could lose everything: her family, her future, her first love . . . and maybe even her mind.

Welcome to the Kingdom, a dazzling fantasy theme park where 'happily ever after' is not just a promise, but a rule . . .

It's a fairytale which ends in murder as the one of the 'Fantasists' goes renegade. Ana, a half-human, half-android princess, is tasked with entertaining visitors and making wishes come true but now she's on trial, after finding herself experiencing emotions and romantic feelings against all her programming.

Told through court testimony, interrogation records and fragmented flashbacks, Jess Rothenberg's The Kingdom has the futuristic appeal of Westworld and the twists and turns of a YA true-crime thriller.

'Disney on steroids . . . a surefire discussion starter about desire and power.' – Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

An instant New York Times bestseller, Wilder Girls is Rory Power's chilling and unputdownable YA debut. The Power meets We Were Liars in this compelling story of survival and the power of female friendships, perfect for fans of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder.

'Body horror meets boarding school in a moving, terrifying thriller' – Guardian

Everyone loses something to the Tox; Hetty lost her eye, Reese's hand has changed, and Byatt just disappeared completely.

It’s been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put in quarantine. The Tox turned the students strange and savage, the teachers died off one by one. Cut off from the mainland, the girls don’t dare wander past the school’s fence where the Tox has made the woods wild and dangerous. They wait for the cure as the Tox takes; their bodies becoming sick and foreign, things bursting out of them, bits missing.

But when Byatt goes missing, Hetty will do anything to find her best friend, even if it means breaking quarantine and braving the horrors that lie in the wilderness past the fence. As she digs deeper, she learns disturbing truths about her school and what else is living on Raxter Island. And that the cure might not be a cure at all . . .

'Your new favourite book' – Cosmopolitan

'Wholly original and compelling' – Observer

'A staggering gut punch of a book' – Kirkus