11 Plus (11+) Recommended Reading List | The Exam Coach

11 Plus (11+) Recommended Reading List

The Importance Of reading for the 11 Plus

Reading is a crucial and key skill required for the 11 Plus exams, especially English comprehension. Being able to read quickly and accurately comes with repeated practice, and therefore it is essential that your child is an avid reader when preparing for the 11 Plus.

Reading regularly also helps to improve your child’s vocabulary (another skill tested in the 11 Plus in both English and verbal reasoning exams). For more help with your child’s vocabulary, check out our 11+ vocabulary podcast below!

We’d recommend that your child reads daily. The time they read for is up to you and depends largely on your child, but getting into a routine of daily reading is key. Try to ensure that your child is reading a wide range of texts and genres. In a comprehension exam, they could be given anything from a newspaper article to an old classic text.

But most importantly, work with your child to find texts and stories they enjoy. (Not everything on the list below will be right for them!) If your child enjoys the book they are reading, they’ll be more enthusiastic and interested, making it a lot easier for them to improve at reading.

Below, we’ve complied a list of recommended books to read when preparing for the 11 Plus. This list is by no means exhaustive, as we could go on forever with book recommendations! However, these are our favourites and a good place to start.

If you have any other recommendations, leave them in the comments below!  

Classics

Hans Christian Andersen — The Complete Fairy Tales

J.M. Barrie — Peter Pan

Frances Hodgson Burnett — The Secret Garden

Lewis Carroll — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Charles Dickens — A Christmas Carol

Rudyard Kipling — The Jungle Book

C.S Lewis — The Chronicles of Narnia

Robert Louis Stevenson — Treasure Island

Jonathan Swift — Gulliver’s Travels

J. R. R. Tolkien — The Hobbit

Jules Verne — Journey to the Centre of the Earth

Adventure Stories

Malorie Blackman — Hacker

Frank Cottrell Boyce — Millions

Roald Dahl — George’s Marvellous Medicine

Mark Haddon — The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time

Jeff Kinney — Diary of A Wimpy Kid

Edith Nesbit —  Five Children and It

Edith Nesbit — The Railway Children

Louis Sacher — Holes

Lemony Snicket — A Series of Unfortunate Events

Fantasy Stories

David Almond — Skellig

Holly Black — The Spiderwick Chronicles

Orson Scott Card — Ender’s Game

James Dashner — The Maze Runner

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — The Lost World

Michael Ende — The Neverending Story

William Golding — Lord of the Flies

Anthony Horowitz — Stormbreaker

Eva Ibbotson — The Secret of Platform 13

Lois Lowry — The Giver

Derek Landy — Skulduggery Pleasant

Sophie McKenzie — The Medusa Project

Garth Nix — Mr Monday

Phillippa Pearce — Tom's Midnight Garden

Phillip Pullman — The Northern Lights

Rick Riordan — Percy Jackson and the Lightening Bolt

J.K. Rowling — Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

Alex Scarrow — Time Riders

Mysteries

Agatha Christie — And Then There Were None

Siobhan Dowd — The London Eye Mystery

Arthur Conan Doyle — Sherlock Holmes

Cornelia Funke — The Thief Lord

Julia Golding — The Diamonds of Drury Lane

Anthony Horowitz — The Diamond Brothers

Erich Kaster — Emil and the Detectives

Carolyn Keene — Nancy Drew

M.G. Leonard — The Highland Falcon Thief

Nature Stories

Richard Adams — Watership Down

Roald Dahl — Fantastic Mr. Fox

Roald Dahl — The Giraffe, The Pelly and Me

Kenneth Grahame — The Wind in the Willows

Hugh Lofting — Dr Dolittle

George Orwell — Animal Farm

Dr. Seuss — The Cat in the Hat

Anna Sewell — Black Beauty

Dodie Smith — The Hundred and One Dalmatians

E.B. White — Charlotte’s Web

Historical Stories

Nina Bawden — Carrie’s War

Anne Holm — I am David

Caroline Lawrence — The Roman Mysteries

Michelle Magorian — Goodnight Mister Tom

Michael Morpurgo — Warhorse

Ian Serallier — The Silver Sword

Robert Swindells — Blitzed

Non-Fiction

Sarah Albee — Accidental Archaeologists: True Stories of Unexpected Discoveries

Christopher Lloyd — Britannica All New Children’s Encyclopedia: What We Know and What We Don’t

David Long and Simon Tyler — The World's Most Magnificent Machines

Glenn Murphy — How Loud Can You Burp?

Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson — Two Truths and a Lie

Guy Raz and Mindy Thomas — The How and Wow of the Human Body: From Your Tongue to Your Toes and all the Guts in Between

Poetry

William Black —The Tyger

Robert Browning — The Pied Piper of Hamlin

Lewis Carroll — Jabberwocky

Robert Frost — The Road Not Taken

Mary Howitt — The Spider And The Fly

Rudyard Kipling — If

Edward Lear — The Owl and the Pussycat

Alfred Noyes — The Highwayman

Alfred Tennyson — The Charge of the Light Brigade