Nero Awards 2025

Based on the true story of Indian WWI gunner and Victoria Cross recipient Khudadad Khan. The story is told from four perspectives: Lotte, a Belgian farmgirl whose village is the flashpoint for a battle; Ernst, a German teenage infantry soldier whose grandiose dreams of war lie in tatters; Khudadad Khan, the gunner fighting with the British Army; and the walnut tree that shelters them all.

Patrice Lawrence's first contemporary middle grade novel is a page-turning mystery and exploration of fractured families, long-buried secrets and the power of friendship, told with warmth and compassion.Three 13-year-old strangers are connected by one big secret.Nervous Ayrton was stolen away from his mum as a baby. He was returned safely, but now Mum won't let him out of her sight.Curious Stanley has a forbidden grandmother. His mum won't even talk about her.Homeless Sen has finally found a place to live, but she'll be out on the street if she upsets her secretive landlady.What happens when their paths cross...?Stunning storytelling — by turns powerful and witty — from an exceptional writer for young people. A page-turning mystery with real depth.Endorsements“Masterful storytelling weaves together the lives of the three protagonists in a page-turning mystery with a fierce heart.” — The Scotsman“[An] instantly gripping, funny and moving 9+ story by an outstanding contemporary author.” — The Guardian“Secrets and lies power People Like Stars... Lawrence's plot twists are fuelled by compassion” — The Observer“A classroom-friendly story for younger teenagers.” — The Times Children's Book of the WeekPatrice Lawrence has won the Waterstones Children's Prize and the YA Book Prize and has been shortlisted for multiple other prestigious awards.

There is a secret world of dragons that lurks at the edges of our own. But dragons also live among us. These Slumberers have been human for so long they have forgotten their true selves—until something awakens the dragon within.Twelve-year-old Alex Evans is about to wake up.Ever since her father’s death, Alex’s overprotective mother has smothered her with unbreakable rules and unspoken fears. Feeling trapped, Alex’s frustration has become too big to hide away. Burning inside, she erupts into a fierce, fiery roar.A new school and a new life await Alex on the legendary island of Skralla, one of the last surviving dragon havens. There, she will train alongside other young dragons who are wild, untamed, and—unlike Alex—skilled at transforming and embracing their dragons within.As dark factions begin to rise, Alex finds herself in a race to unlock her long-dormant power before Drak Midna, the greatest dragon of all, rises again to wage war against the human world.An astonishing new fantasy series takes flight in this soaring, action-packed adventure filled with twists and surprises. The secret world of dragons is waiting for you!

There's a war going on out there, and I'm missing it.When war comes to London in 1939, Ronnie Smith is scared and excited: scared of the bombs that fall at night, but excited to race his friends to collect the best bits of shrapnel every morning.But for Ronnie, the battles aren't just in the sky and on the streets. They're at school and at home too. His little brother is up to no good with a secret job and dangerous new friends, and Ronnie's worried he's getting himself into big trouble.Ronnie's desperate to help his little brother. But he isn't expecting to uncover secrets that could change the fate of the whole war...An explosive new novel about the friendship and courage of a group of young boys living through the Second World War, from award-winning author Jenny Pearson.

Plans for the expansion of the Capmeadow Business Park are in full swing — its mission is to become the greatest business park in the region. Tom Crowley, a mid-level employee, loses his daughter at 'bring your daughter to work day'. He raises the alarm, and his colleagues rush to help him find her. Eventually, after no sign of her is found, it transpires she was never there. And yet, as time goes on, Tom still cannot accept that she is really at home. Refusing to accept that she is safe, Tom continues to search for her in the maze of corridors and impossible multi-dimensional spaces that make up his place of work...Because Capmeadow is expanding in unexpected ways, a liaison officer becomes the central focus for complaints about how the expansion is impacting the lives of the employees — unexpected buildings, years-long business days, cursed farmers' markets, and corridors of the mind are draining the life from Tom and everyone he works with.Years pass, and Tom remains at the company, convinced he is in the presence of his now-adult daughter. But has he judged it correctly? And can anything go back to the way it was?

Lush takes readers into the exclusive world of sommeliers and wine critics, following four characters who are each at a crisis point in their lives when they receive mysterious invitations to a vineyard estate in the South of France to drink the oldest bottle of wine in the world. Over the course of several days, they indulge in delicious food and drink, engage in raucous debauchery, and confront hard truths about themselves that leave them changed forever. The novel tackles themes of class, racism, addiction, professionalism, and privacy with a deft touch, balancing riotously enjoyable set pieces and thoughtful exploration of important issues.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.A Family Matter is an exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.A young wife following her heart. A husband with the law on his side. Their daughter, caught in the middle. Forty years later, a family secret changes everything.

For ten months of the year, two men are drawn to adjacent seats in a stadium, carrying the burdens of life and pouring all their hopes into their beloved but ailing team.Fatherless and fretful, the Young Man is trying to nurture a precarious new relationship and to find his place in the world. The Old Man, an increasingly isolated carer for his fading wife, knows he has little left to look forward to. Neither fan is a comfortable talker. However, in a slow-motion play of nods, silences and guarded chats, they strike up a tentative friendship across the generational gap.Told through thirty-eight chapters — one for each game of the Premier League campaign — Season is a lyrical, hypnotic and gently uplifting study of loneliness and modern masculinity. About much more than football, it celebrates the healing, unifying and maddening role of ritualised sport in the lives of ordinary people.

When Ebun gives birth to her daughter, Eniiyi, on the day they bury her cousin Monife, there is no denying the startling resemblance between the child and the dead woman. So begins the belief, fostered and fanned by the entire family, that Eniiyi is the actual reincarnation of Monife, fated to follow in her footsteps in all ways, including that tragic end.There is also the matter of the family “No man will call your house his home. And if they try, they will not have peace...” which has been handed down from generation to generation, breaking hearts and causing three generations of abandoned Falodun women to live under the same roof.When Eniiyi falls in love with the handsome boy she saves from drowning, she can no longer run from her family’s history. As several women in her family have done before, she ill-advisedly seeks answers in older, darker spiritual corners of Lagos, demanding solutions. Is she destined to live out the habitual story of love and heartbreak? Or can she break the pattern once and for all, not only avoiding the spiral that led Monife to her lonely death, but liberating herself from all the family secrets and unspoken traumas that have dogged her steps since before she could remember?Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of modernity and superstition, vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. With its unforgettable cast of characters, it asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we’ve been given.A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition.Endorsements“A bombshell of a book... Sharp, explosive, hilarious.” — New York Times

2014: A great poem is read aloud and never heard again. For generations, people speculate about its message, but no copy has yet been found.2119: The lowlands of the UK have been submerged by rising seas. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost.Tom Metcalfe, an academic at the University of the South Downs, part of Britain’s remaining island archipelagos, pores over the archives of that distant era, captivated by the freedoms and possibilities of human life at its zenith. When he stumbles across a clue that may lead to the lost poem, a story is revealed of entangled loves and a crime that destroy his assumptions about people he thought he knew intimately well.

Thomas lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, working his grandpa’s trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the grey, gloomy beach and scrape for shrimp, spending the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and scum, pining for Joan Wyeth down the street, and rehearsing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but it remains a private dream.When a striking visitor turns up, bringing the promise of Hollywood glamour, Thomas is shaken from the drudgery of his days and begins to see a different future. But how much of what the American claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?Haunting and timeless, this is the story of a young man hemmed in by his circumstances, striving to achieve fulfilment far beyond the world he knows.

He will stay like this forever, Robert’s arm draped round him. They will be forever twenty.Scotland, 1933. Bobby MacBryde is on his way. After years grafting at Lees Boot Factory, he’s off to the Glasgow School of Art, to his future. On his first day he will meet another Robert, a quiet man with loose dark curls – and never leave his side.Together they will spend every penny and every minute devouring Glasgow – its botanical gardens, the Barras market, a whole hidden city – all the while loving each other behind closed doors. With the world on the brink of war, their unrivalled talent will take them to Paris, Rome, London. They will become stars as the bombs fall, hosting wild parties with the likes of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Elizabeth Smart. But the brightest stars burn fastest.Stunningly reimagined, The Two Roberts is a profoundly moving story of devotion and obsession, art and class. It is a love letter to MacBryde and Colquhoun, the almost-forgotten artists who tried to change the way the world sees – and paid a devastating price.EndorsementsA BBC Radio 2 Book Club pickBest Fiction Book of 2025 for the Guardian, the Observer, the Herald and the BBC

When the Inter-Continental Kabul opened in 1969, Afghanistan’s first luxury hotel symbolised a dream of a modernising country connected to the world.More than fifty years on, the Inter-Continental is still standing. It has endured Soviet occupation, multiple coups, a grievous civil war, a US invasion and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban. History lives within its scarred windows and walls.Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s Chief International Correspondent, has been checking into the Inter-Continental since 1988. And here, she uses its story to craft a richly immersive history of modern Afghanistan.It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days—an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Asia’. It is the story of Abida, who became the first female chef to cook in the Inter-Con’s famous kitchen after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And it is the story of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-something staff who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy—only to witness the Taliban roaring back in 2021.The result is a remarkably vivid history of how Afghans have survived a half century of destruction and disruption.The story of a hotel. The story of a nation. It is the story of a hotel but also the story of a people.

Britain was once a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands shaped our identities, built our communities and defined our regions. Craftland chronicles the vanishing skills and traditions that used to govern every aspect of life on these shores.From the Isles of Scilly to the Scottish Highlands, James Fox travels the length of Britain to seek out the country’s last great craftspeople.Stepping inside the workshops of blacksmiths and wheelwrights, cutlers and coopers, bellfounders and watchmakers, we glimpse not only our past but another way of life that is not yet lost and might still shape our future.For as long as there are humans, there will be craft. It is all around us, hiding in plain sight, animating even the most ordinary things. Fox shows that Britain is still a craft land, if only we have eyes to see it.EndorsementsShortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year.'Impassioned and inspiring' — The Sunday Times, Book of the Week.'Full of stories of crafts and craftspeople and communities, and creativity over the ages. Wonderful' — Michael Morpurgo.'Beautiful, eye-opening and surprisingly moving — a treat to treasure' — Lucy Worsley.'Extraordinary ... will leave you awestruck' — Xand van Tulleken.'Brimming with fresh news and seasoned with hope. I read it in two gulps with delight' — Andrew Marr.

Sarah Perry's father-in-law David died in the autumn of 2022, only nine days after a cancer diagnosis. Until then he'd been a healthy and happy man. He loved stamp collecting, fish and chips, comic novels, his local church, and the Antiques Roadshow. He was in some ways a very ordinary man, but as he began to die, it became clear how extraordinary he was.Sarah and her husband Robert nursed David themselves at home, eventually with the help of carers and visiting nurses. They bathed, cleaned, and dressed him, comforted him in pain, sat with him through waking and sleeping, talked to him, sang to him, and prayed with him.Day by day and hour by hour, they witnessed what happens to the body and spirit as death approaches and finally arrives.Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about death; it is a book about dying, and it is a book about family, care, and love.

We Came By Sea: Stories of a Greater Britain is an untold story of the small boats crisis, a story that shows the best of us. It tells of the volunteers who help thousands of refugees in Calais, of the lifeboat crews mounting one of the great search-and-rescue operations of all time, and of an unrecognised, uncelebrated, almost unknown Britain that is giving its all to help the vulnerable and desperate. It is a journey through an unexamined nation, a nation as truly great and good as the people in the dinghies believe Britain to be. This is not the story we have been told, and it is a true story.