Autumn Term

When The Mountains Roared by Jess Butterworth

Ruby’s been uprooted from her home in Australia and moved to the mountains of India, where her Dad’s got a new job managing a hotel. Australia was everything she knew and loved, and was full of memories of her mum, who died last year.

Ruby misses Australia terribly, but in the remote Himalayas she finds herself surrounded by incredible wildlife and soon realises her new home is special too. Except something’s not quite right: her Dad’s hiding things, the hotel owners are super shifty, and there are rumours the mountain is cursed. And when Ruby stumbles on a shocking secret, it’s up to her to try and save the animals now under threat: the mountain’s last leopards.

Spring Term

Titanic: Death on the Water by Tom and Tony Bradman

Fascinating fictional retelling of the events that led to the tragedy of the Titanic, based on documents from the National Archives. A boy works in the dockyard where the Titanic is being built, then gets a job on the ship. As he witnesses a series of mistakes, short-cuts and bad decisions, he becomes more and more worried about what could happen. But he's preoccupied by his rivalry with a fellow ship's boy and doesn't realise the full scale of what's happening until it's too late...

Summer Term

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Hidden Figures tells the story of Black women who work at Langley Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, starting in the early 1940s. These women play an integral role in the development of American aviation and space technology. They persevere in the face of discrimination against both their race and their gender. The first women are hired to work in an all-Black unit as human “computers,” performing calculations under the direction of engineers. Over the years, as Langley desegregates, the women join engineering teams and serve alongside white men. In the 1960s, they work on the Mercury and Apollo space programs, helping to put a man into orbit and then to put men on the Moon.