Books like Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Stanley Yelnats is sent to Camp Green Lake, where boys spend every day digging holes in a landscape with no lake. The authorities insist this builds character; Stanley suspects they want something else.

Sachar matches Millions in the difficult art of making injustice extremely funny without making it trivial. Every odd detail matters, the deadpan sentences conceal emotional depth, and children forced into an absurd adult system begin forming their own code of loyalty and fairness. Winner of both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, Holes has become a modern classic because its ingenious construction never overwhelms its humanity. Few novels are this clever, this compulsively readable, and this satisfying.

This is the quieter, stranger companion to Millions. Michael has moved into a crumbling house while his baby sister is gravely ill; in the garage, amid dust and dead insects, he discovers an inexplicable figure. Whether the creature is sick man, bird, angel, or something else is less important than the wonder and compassion his presence awakens.

Readers who loved Damian’s matter-of-fact intimacy with saints will recognize Almond’s refusal to fence spirituality away from ordinary life. The miraculous appears among takeout cartons, school worries, grief, and family exhaustion. Skellig won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, and its reputation is deserved: its spare prose creates an atmosphere that many readers remember for decades. Millions makes holiness comic and bustling; Skellig makes it mysterious, fragile, and unforgettable.