Best books for Upper Key Stage 2

Upper Key Stage 2, Years 5 and 6, is where readers can take on real ambition: longer novels, moral complexity, characters who change, and the first books that look towards secondary.

This list gathers class novels worth a half-term, graphic-novel memoirs that build empathy, a verse novel or two, and stories about identity, migration and justice that reward proper discussion, alongside immersive reads for disappearing into. The quality bar is high, because this is where a reader takes off or quietly stops.