Children's / Teenage fiction: Historical fiction

Orphan Ettie Shaw is penniless and homeless on the streets of London when she is spotted by her older brother Joe. Joe has fallen in with a notorious pickpocket gang run by a man called Fagin, and Ettie has to disguise herself as a boy so she can come back with him to Fagin's lair. At first Ettie...

You can't choose your family. If you could, Marcus would never have opted to be a Pritchard. With one brother locked up and the other one working with their dad on plans for their next big robbery, they are well-known in their tightknit Welsh community, for all the wrong reasons. When a mysteriou...

Margaret Thursday answers an advertisement for an actress who can appear to be 11 years old. Her subsequent successes on the stage bring with them the unwanted drama of a kidnap rumour. Day and night she is closely protected - but not closely enough.

Hack and Whack babysit a toddler - Fire Hazard - and discover to their horror that they might not be the worst Vikings in the village after all! Then they manage to secure an exciting invite to feast with the visiting king, but discover that it's three days of having to be on their best behaviour...

Huw always pops in to see his nan on the way home from school - she bakes him cakes and never fusses about his homework. And so it's a great shock when, one day, Nan forgets his name, and calls him Hywel - the long-unmentionable name of her late brother. As Nan slowly slips into the grip of demen...

Fin is a foundling growing up in the Hackney marshes, living in a tiny attic and selling leeches for a living. When she accidentally discovers she is the long-lost child of a rich Polish family called the Kaminskis, she is swept up into a supernatural adventure where she has to use everything she...

Nastia is no traitor. She is a daring pilot, the daughter of revolutionaries, and now, as the Second World War descents on Russia, she must fight to save the glorious Motherland. But all is not as it seems, and when the battles begin, secrets are revealed and everything that she once knew is chal...

Sometimes I was jealous of the monster of Frankenstein. I grew up believing my father cared more for him than he did for me. And was I wrong? Maggie Walton's father has dedicated his life to a single pursuit: hunting down the monster created by Victor Frankenstein. It has cost Maggie and her fami...

This story is part of 'Reading Champion', a series carefully linked to book bands to encourage independent reading skills, developed with Dr Sue Bodman and Glen Franklin of UCL Institute of Education (IOE). Freya doesn't always feel brave, but she tries her best. And when she sneaks away on a Vik...

This story is part of 'Reading Champion', a series carefully linked to book bands to encourage independent reading skills, developed with Dr Sue Bodman and Glen Franklin of UCL Institute of Education (IOE). Freya doesn't always feel brave, but she tries her best. And when she sneaks away on a Vik...