Young Quills reviews 2025
The Young Quills Awards for best historical fiction for young people
Published: 1st July 2025

The Young Quills books for each year must be published for the first time in English in the year preceding the competition – so 2024 for this year’s selection. Divided by age suitability the books are given to schools on the condition that the children and young people there write a review of the book following our criteria. Those reviews are used as the basis for us to create the shortlist from which the winners are selected.
You can read some of the children and young people's reviews of all this year's books via the links below. Shortlisted books are marked with an asterisk:
For readers aged 5-8 years
For readers aged 8-11 years
- Angel of Grasmere*
- Birdie*
- The Boy, the Witch and the Queen of Scots*
- Circus Maximus: Return of the Champion*
- Roman Boy*
- The Angel Player
- Cosima Unfortunate Foils a Fraud
- Fablehouse: Heart of Fire
- The Great Phoenix of London
- Hide and Seek: A Bletchley Park Mystery
- The Houdini Inheritance
- I am Rebel
- The Last Boy
- The Millicent Quibb School of Etiquette for Young Ladies of Mad Science
- My Brother Plato
- Nush and the Stolen Emerald
- Relic Hamilton, Genie Hunter
- The River Spirit
- The River Thief
- Rosie Raja: Undercover Codebreaker
- Star of the Show
- The Storming of Cirencester
- The War of the Heavenly Horses
- Witchspark