Book lists

Are you a fan of the book you're reading keeping you up all night through sheer terror? Or maybe you need to read an award-winning book for school and you're having trouble finding one. Perhaps you like reading about entirely other worlds, or slightly wonky realities? Or maybe that's too far-flung and you prefer to read something that could plausibly be experienced by real people.

We've got a quite a few lists here, so we're hoping there's something to suit every taste and genre fan!

Read on to find an assortment of booklists based around Genres, a bunch of lists that are useful at school for those situations where your English teacher wants you to read an award-winning book or a book by a Māori author (and we've got a list of books that are great if you've just started high school and you're looking for something to read too), as well as our lists of Books From Around The World - our eventual goal is to feature at least one book from every single country!

There's a mixture of novels, graphic novels, and comics in these lists, but if you're more of a comics-only person head over to our Comics page to find a selection of Comic Genre Guides.

If you're a fan of a certain genre, these are the booklists for you!

There's Adventure, Thrillers, Romance, Fantasy... What more could you want!

These lists are also things you may want to read without your teacher requesting it, if you like reading award-winning books, LOCAL award-winning books, and books by authors from Aotearoa.

It’s often interesting to get a different perspective on the world. Here are some books set in some far-flung places – and some places close to home – grouped by continent/large body of water with islands in it. The books on this list are (mostly) written by authors from the countries they are about, and in many cases have been translated into English from their mother tongues (the book we’ve chosen for Madagascar, Return to the enchanted island by Johary Ravaloson, is only the second book to have ever been translated from Malagasy into English!).

Not all of the books are in the Young Adult collection, but we’ve tried to make sure that they all at least feature kids or teens in prominent places in the story. Our eventual goal is to have at least one book for every country in the world! Help us out by sending in recommendations if you’ve found one we’ve missed!