ENRICHMENT
KS3 Essentials playlist
This playlist contains some books that you ought to read before the end of KS3. There are so many great books for younger readers these days, and many of them are very popular with our students, especially crime series like Holly Jackson’s novels, which are great. But we wanted to include some modern classics that may have fallen off the radar for younger readers in the mid-2020s. All of these novels are relatively recent — nothing older than the 1990s — and though there are, of course, many brilliant classic novels for children that are much older than this, we wanted to focus on modern classics for this playlist.
KS3 Essentials
His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman (1995-2000)
The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling (1997-2007)
Skellig by David Almond (1998)
Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman (2001)
Coraline by Neil Gaiman (2002)
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time by Mark Haddon (2003)
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne (2006)
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (2006)
Chaos Walking trilogy by Patrick Ness (2008-2010)
The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008-2010)
The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han (2009)
The Fault In Our Stars by John Green (2012)
Cuckoo Song by Frances Hardinge (2014)
The Sun Is Also A Star by Nicola Yoon (2016)
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas (2017)
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell (2024)