A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A Brown

For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts Malik’s younger sister, Nadia, as payment into the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal—kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran, for Nadia’s freedom. But Karina has deadly aspirations of her own. Her mother, the Sultana, has been assassinated; her court threatens mutiny; and Solstasia looms like a knife over her neck. Grief-stricken, Karina decides to resurrect her mother through ancient magic . . . requiring the beating heart of a king. And she knows just how… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial slurs
  • Emotional & physical child abuse
  • Infidelity mentioned
  • Anxiety & panic attack (on-page, protagonist)
  • Depersonalisation & derealization
  • Hallucinations
  • Self-harm & self-harm ideation
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Emesis
  • Blood depiction
  • Grief & loss depiction (theme)
  • Death of a father & sister recounted
  • Death of a mother (on-page)
  • Murder & attempted murder and regicide
  • Police brutality
  • Whipping mentioned
  • Knife violence & stabbing
  • Kidnapping & hostage situation
  • Fire recounted
  • Colonialism themes, including refugee experiences, riots & stampede
  • Animal cruelty & death, including animal sacrifice

All That Impossible Space by Anna Morgan

15-year-old Lara Laylor feels like a supporting character in her own life. She’s Ashley’s best friend, she’s Hannah’s sister she’s never just Lara. When new history teacher Mr Grant gives her an unusual assignment: investigating the mystery of the Somerton Man. Found dead in on an Adelaide beach in 1948, a half-smoked cigarette still in his mouth and the labels cut out of his clothes, the Somerton Man has intrigued people for years. Was he a spy? A criminal? Year 10 has plenty of mysteries of its own: boys, drama queen friends, and enigmatic new students… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Ableism
  • Grooming behaviour & discussions of a teacher-student relationship
  • Toxic friendship (theme)
  • Suicide mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption
  • Asthma attacks (on-page)
  • Murder & dead bodies discussed
  • Drowning recounted
  • Bullying (rumour spreading)

All Our Yesterdays by Cristin Terrill

Em is locked in a bare, cold cell with no comforts. Finn is in the cell next door. The Doctor is keeping them there until they tell him what he wants to know. Trouble is, what he wants to know hasn’t happened yet. Em and Finn have a shared past, but no future unless they can find a way out. The present is torture – being kept apart, overhearing each other’s anguish as the Doctor relentlessly seeks answers. There’s no way back from here, to what they used to be, the world they used to know. Then Em finds a note in her cell which changes everything. It’s from her future self and… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Slut-shaming
  • Disordered food thoughts, restrictive eating (dieting) & internalised body shaming
  • Nightmares & flashbacks
  • Suicide (on-page)
  • Drugging
  • Blood & injury depiction, including serious injury of a loved one, hospitalisation, needles, surgery, emesis and comas
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of both parents
  • Death of a friend & brother
  • Murder & attempted murder
  • Torture & psychological torture
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping & hostage situation
  • Incarceration
  • Fire

Aftermath by Kelley Armstrong

Three years after losing her brother Luka in a school shooting, Skye Gilchrist is moving home. But there’s no sympathy for Skye and her family because Luka wasn’t a victim; he was a shooter. Jesse Mandal knows all too well that the scars of the past don’t heal easily. The shooting cost Jesse his brother and his best friend–Skye. Ripped apart by tragedy, Jesse and Skye can’t resist reopening the mysteries of their past. But old wounds hide darker secrets. And the closer Skye and Jesse get to the truth of what happened that day, the closer they get to a new killer.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & Islamophobia
  • Drugging
  • Blood depiction
  • Death of a brother recounted
  • School shooting (theme)
  • Gun violence
  • Kidnapping
  • Stalking
  • Fire
  • Bullying

Ace of Shadows by Amanda Foody

Enne Salta was raised as a proper young lady, and no lady would willingly visit New Reynes, the so-called City of Sin. But when her mother goes missing, Enne must leave her finishing school—and her reputation—behind to follow her mother’s trail to the city where no one survives uncorrupted. Frightened and alone, Enne has only one lead: the name Levi Glaisyer. Unfortunately, Levi is not the gentleman she expected—he’s a street lord and a con man. Levi is also only one payment away from cleaning up a rapidly unraveling investment scam, so he doesn’t have time to investigate a… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Paedophilia & sexual assault*
  • Blood & injury depiction, including burns
  • Death of a mother
  • Death of a friend in a fire
  • Murder (on-page) & regicide
  • Torture
  • Physical assault
  • Poisoning
  • Bullying

Context : The villain is an adult man with a fetish for young girls; the only on-page sexual assault is unwanted touching.

Abroad by Liz Jacobs

Nick Melnikov doesn’t know where he belongs. He was just a kid when his Russian-Jewish family immigrated to Michigan. Now he’s in London for university, overwhelmed by unexpected memories. Socially anxious, intensely private, and closeted, Nick doesn’t expect to fall in so quickly with a tight-knit group of students from his college, and it’s both exhilarating and scary. Hanging out with them is a roller coaster of serious awkward and incredible longing, especially when the most intimidating of the group, Dex, looks his way. Dex Cartwell knows exactly who he… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Coming out themes
  • Transphobia & internalised homophobia
  • Anxiety & agoraphobia
  • Alcohol consumption

All of Us With Wings by Michelle Ruiz Keil

Seventeen-year-old Xochi is alone in San Francisco, running from her painful past: the mother who abandoned her, the man who betrayed her. Then one day, she meets Pallas, a precocious twelve-year-old who lives with her rock-star family in one of the city’s storybook Victorians. Xochi accepts a position as Pallas’s live-in governess and quickly finds her place in their household, which is relaxed and happy despite the band’s larger-than-life fame. But on the night of the Vernal Equinox, as a concert afterparty rages in the house below, Xochi and Pallas accidentally… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & sexism
  • Rape recounted & sexual assault
  • Adult-minor relationship*
  • Child sex trafficking, implied
  • Child abuse & neglect
  • Alcohol consumption & recreational drug use

*Context: The protagonist is a seventeen-year-old girl whose love interest is her twenty-eight-year-old male employer.

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds

A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galuzzi, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement? .But there were witnesses: Quinn Collins.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & racial profiling
  • Police brutality (police shooting)
  • Gun violence

Alex and Eliza by Melissa de la Cruz

As battle cries of the American Revolution echo in the distance, servants flutter about preparing for one of New York society’s biggest events: the Schuylers’ grand ball. Descended from two of the oldest and most distinguished bloodlines in New York, the Schuylers are proud to be one of their fledgling country’s founding families, and even prouder still of their three daughters—Angelica, with her razor-sharp wit; Peggy, with her dazzling looks; and Eliza, whose beauty and charm rival that of both her sisters, though she’d rather be aiding the colonists’ cause than dressing up for some silly ball. Still, she can barely contain her excite… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Victim-blaming
  • Attempted rape
  • Forced marriage
  • Medical procedures
  • War themes

Love, Hate and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed

American-born seventeen-year-old Maya Aziz is torn between worlds. There’s the proper one her parents expect for their good Indian daughter: attending a college close to their suburban Chicago home, and being paired off with an older Muslim boy her mom deems “suitable.” And then there is the world of her dreams: going to film school and living in New York City—and maybe (just maybe) pursuing a boy she’s known from afar since grade school, a boy who’s finally falling into her orbit at school. There’s also the real world, beyond Maya’s control. In the aftermath of a horrific crime perpetrated hundreds of miles… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & Islamophobia
  • Hate crime (physical assault)
  • Disownment
  • Suicide bombing mentioned
  • Hospitalisation for physical injuries due to physical assault
  • Bullying