Upper School Summer Reading 2025

It’s 1965 and at an English country fair, a fortune-teller tells teenage Frances Adams a bone-chilling prediction: one day, Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet. No one takes her seriously, until sixty years later, when Frances is found murdered, like she always said she would be.

In the present day, Annie Adams, arrives at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great-aunt Frances, only to find that Frances is already dead. Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer?

As Annie gets closer to the truth, and closer to the danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.

Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective’ work on the internet (AKA checking up on her son to see if he’s dating anybody yet).

But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Knowing she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could – because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands – Vera decides it’s down to her to catch the killer.

Nobody spills the tea like this amateur sleuth.

After being home-schooled all her life, Sade Hussein is starting her third year of high school at the prestigious Alfred Nobel Academy boarding school. Misfortune has been a constant all her life, but even Sade doesn't expect her new roommate, Elizabeth, to disappear after Sade's first night. Or for people to think she had something to do with it.

With rumors swirling around her, Sade catches the attention of the girls collectively known as the 'Unholy Trinity' and they bring her into their fold. When it seems people don't care enough about what happened to Elizabeth to really investigate, it's up to she and Elizabeth's best friend to solve it. And then a student is found dead. As they keep trying to figure out what's going on, Sade realizes there's more to Alfred Nobel Academy and its students than she thought. Secrets lurk around every corner and beneath every surface...secrets that rival even her own

Hollis Brown, feeling stuck in his small town, has a chance encounter with a mysterious stranger named Walt resulting in a frightening trap. After unknowingly making a deal at the crossroads, Hollis finds himself losing control of his body and mind, falling victim to possession. Walt, the ghost making a home inside him, has a deep and violent history rooted in the town Hollis grew up in and he has unfinished business to take care of.

An unspeakable bond forms between Walt and Hollis, and the boys begin falling for one another in unexpected ways. But, it’s only a matter of time before Hollis’s best friends begin to notice that something about Hollis isn’t quite…right.

With the threat of a long overdue exorcism looming before them, will Walt and Hollis be able to protect their love and undo the curse that turned their town from a garden of possibility into a place where dreams go to die?

Four unlikely allies in a small town investigate a local teen's disappearance, and what they discover festering at the core of their community is far more sinister and ancient than they could’ve ever imagined.

A collection of fifteen horror stories centering on Black girls who battle monsters, both human and supernatural, face down death, and survive.