I love reading David Almond's Skellig with my year 7 class but so many have already read it in year 6 that I need an alternative. What else would you suggest? (And not Louis Sacher's Holes as they have all read that too!)

Fifteen years-old and still packing the same punch as when it was first published, Skellig is a difficult title to replace. Its combination of an apparently simple family story in which Michael struggles with moving house and the near-death of his baby sister with the appearance of Skellig, an unreliable character who can be viewed as entirely real, entirely imaginary or somewhere between the two, provides so much for all readers.

An obvious choice could by My Name is Mina, the prequel to Skellig, if you thought that building on your classes prior knowledge was an advantage. Written over a decade later and in the same luminous and arresting style, Mina tells her story through her own diary, set just before she and Michael meet Skellig.

There are other David Almond titles which can also be described as magical realism such as Heaven Eyes , the story of three children who run away from a children's home and have a series of mysterious adventures as they float down the river on a home made raft, and The Boy Who Swam with Piranhas – although the latter is pitched at a slightly younger audience.

The most obvious successor to Skellig is Patrick Ness's multi-award winning A Monster Calls, the story of a boy dealing with real and imaginary fears after learning that his mother has cancer. Patrick Ness and David Almond share an ability to make what may be imaginary as utterly convincing as the reality it fits alongside – and to draw readers across the usual boundaries between the two as if they did not exist.

Although the original setting is in the past and the boundaries crossed are greater and more obviously separate, Philip Pullman does much the same in His Dark Materials: Northern Lights and its sequels. He too transports readers between real and imaginary worlds leaving readers with questions to answer.

Other stimulating reads for year sevens would be Rebecca Stead's Liar and Spy, Sally Gardner's Maggot Moon and Katherine Rundell's Rooftoppers.

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