Great books to read when you’ve finished Skulduggery Pleasant
“Meet the great Skulduggery Pleasant: wisecracking detective, powerful magician, master of dirty tricks and burglary … Oh yeah. And dead.”
Since its publication in 2007, Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant has won numerous awards, including the Warwickshire Secondary School Book Award in 2008.
What elements of Skulduggery do you most enjoy? Fantasy? Horror? Supernatural? Adventure? Humour? Detective story?
Here are some great books that have elements similar to those in Skulduggery Pleasant‌
Lockwood and Co. specialize in investigating the supernatural. Anthony Lockwood is charismatic, clever and reckless and there is humour mixed with the horror.
You may also like the next book by the same author.!
“When the 5,000-year-old djinni Bartimaeus is summoned by Nathaniel, a young magician's apprentice, he expects to have to do nothing more taxing than a little levitation or a few simple illusions. But Nathaniel is a precocious talent and has something rather more dangerous in mind: revenge. Against his will, Bartimaeus is packed off to steal the powerful Amulet of Samarkand from Simon Lovelace, a master magician of unrivalled ruthlessness and ambition.�
First in a terrific series.!
“Everyone’s heard of Malice, but hardly anyone has actually seen it: a comic about a horrifying world of tricks and traps, overseen by the sinister master of ceremonies, Tall Jake. The story goes that the kids who go through Tall Jake’s deadly trials are real kids, who’ve disappeared from the real world and turned up in the comic.”
The book itself is a clever mixture of novel and comic.!
We walk past statues and gargoyles on buildings every day without even noticing them. But what if they came to life? “When George breaks a small dragon carving from the Natural History Museum he finds himself plunged into a world he can’t understand.”
First in a series.!
“When young Will Stanton discovers he has come of age as the lastborn of the Old Ones, the immortal keepers of the force of the Light, he is swept up in the age-old struggle between the powers of Light and Dark.� An outstandingly wellwritten fantasy that has stood the test of time.!
“Ged is but a goatherd on the island of Gont when he comes by his strange powers over nature. Sent to the School of Wizards on Roke, he learns the true way of magic and proves himself a powerful magician.” Ursula Le Guin has been called ‘a writer of phenomenal power.’
“There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife. The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.� So begins the story of Bod who is raised in a graveyard by ghosts. This book won the Carnegie Medal & the American Newbery Medal in the same year.
Tom Ward is the seventh son of a seventh son and is able to see ghosts and boggarts. He is therefore apprenticed to a ‘spook’ called John Gregory who travels the country fighting supernatural creatures. Can Tom be braver than all the other apprentices and become a ‘spook’ himself? The first book in a series.
Another series that features the seventh son of a seventh son who becomes an apprentice. “Septimus Heap, is stolen the night he is born by a midwife who pronounces him dead. That same night, the baby's father, Silas Heap, comes across a bundle in the snow containing a new born girl with violet eyes…But who is this mysterious baby girl, and what really happened to their beloved son Septimus?” ‘Magyk’ is the first book in the series.
Terry Pratchett is a master of combining fantasy and humour. The cover of ‘The Colour of Magic’ shows The Luggage, a large wooden chest that runs around on little legs and follows the wizard Rincewind wherever he goes. It has been described as ‘half suitcase, half homicidal maniac’. There are more than 40 books in the Discworld series.
More titles!
All these books- are in stock in the School Library!
Mrs Watts (March 2017)
All quotations in this presentation are taken from book blurbs on print copies or online.!