What to read

As a part of the NLF Reading Challenge 2025, young readers have to read this thoughtfully curated list of books over a period of 3 months. This list brings together the best of children’s literature available in the Indian market, striving to push children’s reading horizons, encouraging them to look beyond the bestsellers that dominate the market, while taking into account availability, affordability, and student interests.

Participants will read not just highly regarded books published in recent years, but also contemporary classics of children’s literature such as Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. They will read across genres and forms, including T.S. Eliot’s whimsical collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and visual narratives like P.N.K. Panicker’s Ghost Stories and The Other Side of Tomorrow. There are two books—Movies Showing Nowhere and Kiki’s Delivery Service—in translation from Dutch and Japanese respectively. The list features stories that champion environmental awareness, explore disabilities, celebrate found families, critique censorship. There are wild, wacky stories guaranteed to leave readers in splits; there are eerie stories; there are stories that will break hearts and knit them back together with hope.

From rural Tamil Nadu to Costa Rica, from post-Partition India to dystopian futures and magical elseworlds, the titles on our list travel across time and space and the boundaries of reality. We hope they invite young readers to keep their imaginations “big, sharp, and hungry,” to cultivate a sense of wonder “that the world, in all its dangers and clumsiness, in all its beauties and miracles, demands of us,” in the words of beloved author Katherine Rundell.