The Ministry of Education, Training and Sport's latest reading barometer, published last May, showed that children and young people are the most widely read population group. According to data from the same report, 85.6% of children aged 10 to 14 read frequently and occasionally in their free time; a percentage that remains close to 80% among young people between 15 and 18 years old. On this basis, books are presented as a valuable commodity that cannot be missing from the gifts that the Magi will distribute in the apartments and houses of Spain in the early hours of January 6 next year.
In this selection we propose eight titles for readers between 8 and 16 years old. Among them there is no lack of the second installment of the impressive graphic novel saga The Nameless City, a novel that immerses us in a holiday destination where books are forbidden, or the latest work by the writer Nando López, which provides readers with a Challenge challenges thriller that brings to light many of the ills of our society.
In this illustrated book, renowned French author Rébecca Dautremer takes one of her iconic characters, the rabbit Jacominus Gainsborough, to give shape to a cumulative story that is a hymn to lifelong friendships. Those relationships that start in completely unexpected ways and then solidify through the accumulation of memories big and small that are remembered with ever-increasing nostalgia as the years go by. In the composition of the book, Dautremer mixes beautiful realistic contemporary illustrations with extraordinary, almost surreal double-page drawings, illustrations that invite us to discover the memories that irrevocably link the lives of old Jacominus and his friend Policarpo. A beauty.
It wasn't easy to overcome the impact of the first part of The City Without a Name, but Faith Erin Hicks does it with The Heart of Stone. On its pages the reader encounters the protagonists of the saga and, above all, the fast-paced and fascinating mix of adventure and political thriller that characterizes this major work and that enables a wide range of reading levels. In fact, it will not take the adult audience long to find a certain parallel between the unstable political situation in Spain and the intrigues and power struggles between the members of the Dao clan and the rest of the peoples who are waiting for the opportunity to seize power in the nameless city to take over. As in the first part, Faith Erin Hicks leaves readers with an open heart and wants to know the outcome of the trilogy as quickly as possible.
Yasmina's father has a humble job, so humble that he barely gives them enough to live on. Yasmina, on the other hand, is a girl with a natural talent for making use of every little bit of food in the kitchen that her friends give her from the neighborhood community garden. Its destruction to create a large company producing “mutant” potatoes will endanger the balance of the family and will also be the starting point of this action-packed graphic novel that will bring the reader closer in an understandable way without giving up a sense of humor, complex and wide-ranging current debates such as social inequalities, the power of the food industry, the genetic modification of food or the importance of the citizen movement to end clear situations of neglect and abuse of power.
The founder and editorial director of the cathedral, Luigi Spagnol, who died in 2020, and the renowned Italian writer Pierdomenico Baccalario draw this entertaining story that takes us to an Italian summer town. In Banalia, books and reading itself are forbidden. Pierluigi, the main child, travels there with his parents. And there he meets other minors who share a dubious trait with him: they don't like reading. So apparently they're in the perfect city for them. But people are indecipherable and everything seems to indicate that bans are sometimes the best strategy for fostering passion for something. These young people will discover this little by little in a story with a surprising ending full of allusions to great literary classics that perfectly combines intrigue, humor and adventure.
Acclaimed Italian author Chiara Carminati fictionalizes a real-life event from World War II to immerse the reader in a journey that takes the Italian region of Trieste (then disputed between Italy and Yugoslavia) to South Africa. The reader embarks on the journey and follows the steps of a 15-year-old boy determined to find his father alive, 11 years earlier after the attack by a German submarine on a British ship carrying hundreds of Italians While traveling along the coast of West Africa, prisoners of war disappeared on board. The genres of history, adventure and initiation come together in this brilliant and emotional novel in which a courageous and intrepid teenager crosses the world in search of his father, without knowing that he will find himself in the end on this journey Learn wonderfully from one another.
This is the story of October, a 10-year-old girl who lives alone in the forest with her father, happy and wild in her isolation from the world. However, when she turns eleven, an unfortunate accident involving her father forces her to return to civilization, exchanging the freedom of the forest for a townhouse in London, the silence and sounds of nature for the noise of the big city, in order to live there Mother, whom he hates since she decided to “abandon” her wild life and with it her daughter. This collision of two seemingly opposite and irreconcilable worlds gives this novel a classic flavor with which Katya Balen has created a kind of literary “Captain Fantastic”, a work that, like the film with Viggo Mortensen, will leave a deep mark on readers.
“The Sleepers” is a fabulous and addictive “thriller” in which a dramatic event, the appearance in the open field of a completely naked young woman who finds a video on her cell phone of herself naked and drugged, The author serves Nando López talks about rape culture, but also about the unscrupulousness of the media and the social difficulty of accepting people who are different. This difficulty is suffered by the main character of this novel, a young aspiring journalist, Gael, who has to face the ghosts of his past in order to report on a news story in which he ends up unintentionally becoming the protagonist.
An image of a small town surrounded by a kind of clouds, which takes the shape of a woman's profile, serves as the opening to this graphic novel that revisits the myth of the Pantafa. It is a frightening Italian legend, typical of the Abruzzo region, which refers to the ghost of a woman who wanders at night and paralyzes her victims in bed. This myth, which could be a popular explanation for what we now know as sleep disorder (sleep paralysis), is masterfully told by Marco Taddei (translation by Marta Tutone) and immerses us in a gothic horror story that is downright horrifying foreshadowed. La Came's spectacular black and white illustrations help to perfectly convey the dark and unhealthy atmosphere that surrounds the town of “Malanotte”, where the protagonist of the story returns to host his neighbors and the stories of one in their legends anchored small town and unaware of the progress of modernity.
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