It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, our review panel reads scores of new books and we highlight five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top books for you to read in October 2024.
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, our review panel reads scores of new books and we highlight five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top books for you to read in September 2024.
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, our review panel reads scores of new books and we highlight five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top books for you to read in August 2024.
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, our review panel reads scores of new books and we highlight five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top books for you to read in July 2024.
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, our review panel reads scores of new books and we highlight five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top books for you to read in June 2024.
If you like The Final Year, try these…
The Final Year is an extraordinary verse novel about the last year of primary school, told through poetry. The verse captures the character of Year 6 pupil Nate as he navigates issues of school, family illness, emotions, change and friendships. Year 6 is a difficult year for many children and whilst they are unlikely to have it quite as difficult as Nate, the book still captures some of that flavour, including the run-up to SATs, friendship issues and anxiety during a time when a sense of big changes is in the air.
Through powerful verses, ex-primary school teacher Matt Goodfellow pays testament to the impact of a great teacher in supporting pupils through this time as well as the power of words and writing to help manage big emotions.
The book has seen phenomenal popularity among teachers in Upper Key Stage 2, and has brought verse novels for primary into the spotlight as well as winning our Books of the Year ‘Best Classroom Read-Aloud’ category for Upper KS2.
We’ve put together a list of ten similar books for fans of The Final Year. Readers who love the verse novel format will feel at home with The Way of Dog or In the Key of Code. For those looking for more school-based stories in a similar style, try Little Light or Malorie Blackman’s Cloud Busting. Some readers will be keen to find more verse novels that capture emotional situations through narrative poetry and we recommend The Stories Grandma Forgot or Sharon Creech’s much-loved verse novel Love That Dog. If you want to try something a little more whimsical with darker humour, try Revolting Rhymes or Zombierella.
For readers who were intrigued by the references to David Almond’s classic Year 6 novel, why not pick up a copy of Skellig too?
Browse the full list below of books for children looking for more books like The Final Year…
It’s easy to feel lost in the flood of so many new children’s books available. Each month, our review panel reads scores of new books and we highlight five of our recently published favourites.
Check out our Review Panel’s top books for you to read in May 2024.
New Additions – Updated 2025
Each of our Year Group Recommended Reads lists contains 50 books specially picked out for reading for pleasure in each primary year group, from Preschool to Year 6. The lists are designed to provide recommendations of age-appropriate and accessible books across a range of genres and styles. These lists differ from our topic booklists, as the books are purely selected to read for pleasure at each age group. The Year Group lists also come with printable posters and checklists.
We update our lists annually and schools can purchase sets of the packs from Peters. As well as the full book packs, schools can also purchase a top-up pack containing just the newly added titles for 2025-2026.
Some of the titles are newly published, whereas others are older favourites that have just been added to the Year Group lists for the first time. Browse the lists below to see the new additions for each year group, launched 3rd June 2025.
The Treehouse books form an enormously popular children’s book series by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton. The series features a fun-loving pair of friends who live in an imaginative treehouse with lots of fun extra rooms. As the series progresses, the treehouse expands and before long contains everything from a movie theatre, dinosaur petting zoo, marshmallow-toasting volcano and a ninja snail academy. Highly illustrated with comic-style line drawings, treehouse diagrams and speech bubbles, these books are popular with children aged 7 to 10. The high image-to-text ratio coupled with its wacky sense of humour have helped the series to earn its reputation for hooking children into reading.
It’s no surprise that many teachers and parents whose children are hooked ask us for what to read next after the Treehouse books. We’ve put together a list of ten books like the 13 Storey Treehouse. Readers who love getting silly with the absurd humour of the Treehouse stories could also try Dave Pigeon or Bunny vs Monkey. For children looking for more stories featuring plenty of comic-style line illustrations and not too much writing on each page, try Max and the Midknights or Murray and Bun. If you like laugh-out-loud action to entertain you while you read, try A Monster Ate My Packed Lunch and Fairy vs Wizard, or you might like to try the graphic novels Stitch Head or Peng and Spanners.
Browse the full list below of books for children looking for what to read next after the Treehouse Series…
If you’re looking for books like You Choose, try these…The You Choose books have seen enormous popularity and are well-loved by children because of the premise of letting the reader choose items from an appealing illustrated scene on each page. Readers are invited to select their favourite food, destination, clothing, hobby and family from a mix of plausible and not-so-plausible cartoon options, illustrated by the inimitable Nick Sharratt. These engaging books have mileage to be read over and over again, and children love interacting with them together with friends or family as they discuss their choices.
Although there is nothing that can quite take the place of these fantastically engaging books, we’ve compiled a list of ten similar books for fans of You Choose. Children looking for more books that put readers’ decisions at the heart might like to try Pick a Story or Which Food Will You Choose. For more books with pages filled with a multitude of smaller pictures to pore over and choose between, try the transport-themed We Catch the Bus or Why Do We Wear Clothes?. If you’re searching for more read-it-again books with interactive mix-and-match elements try Mixed Up Fairy Tales or Story Path, or for a simple this-or-that discussion, dive into all the fun of John Burningham’s Would You Rather.
Browse the full list below of books for children looking for more books like You Choose…
review
Year group(s) the book is most suitable for:
Year group(s) the book is most suitable for:
Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?
Does the book contain anything that teachers would wish to know about before recommending in class (strong language, sensitive topics etc.)?
Would you recommend the book for use in primary schools?
yes
Curriculum links (if relevant)
Curriculum links (if relevant)
Any other comments
Any other comments
