This week, Louise answers a reader request:

We have a 14.5-year-old boy who loved listening to stories as a child (we usually read eight books a night to him and he always wanted more), then he progressed and read books - Geronimo Stilton was a favourite and he read them all, later Diary of a Wimpy Kid and read them all… and his reading really stopped there.

He has brought home a world atlas (can name all capital cities in the world) and likes facts like in the Guinness Book of World Records. But, we just can’t find the next book to get his nose into. Do you have any suggestions that you think might work, please, for a boy?

Kia ora,

Perhaps he’d like to try plot-driven thrillers and adventure stories, with lots of narrative momentum to keep him turning pages; or, science fiction novels, with their inclusion of strange and interesting facts. Graphic novels might also appeal. And don’t discount horror as a genre; many teenage boys enjoy a touch of gruesome. These books are on the shelf of my 15 ½-year-old boy, and I hope some of them tempt yours.

· A series of spy novels written by Anthony Horowitz feature teenager Alex Rider, who discovers that his uncle was a spy before being recruited by MI6 to complete his uncle’s last mission; Stormbreaker is the first in the series, and many of the 13 (so far) have also been adapted as graphic novels.

· Two teenage boys meet just as gene-editing technology is taking off, when the promise of cure and enhancement is balanced by the threat it poses in the hands in Killer T by Robert Muchamore.

· The water’s run out in California and suburban streets have become warzones in Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman; with their parents missing, Alyssa and Garrett have to make unlikely alliances and impossible choices to survive.

· In the year 2380, the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions in an interstellar epic trilogy which begins with Aurora Rising, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff.

· The only suspect to a horrifying crime has an iron-clad alibi in The Outsider by Stephen King, and a police detective has to figure out just how a man can be in two places at once.

· A man is stranded on Mars, unable to communicate with Earth, and every possible scenario ends in his death, in The Martian by Andy Weir.

· K has been trying for years to get into the mysterious and dangerous game with uncertain rewards called Rabbits, when he’s told that something’s gone wrong with the game and it’s him who needs to fix it, in the book by Terry Miles in which the very fate of the universe hangs in the balance.

· The Battlefield franchise is a videogame series; Andy McNab (with Peter Grimsdale) wrote Battlefield 3: The Russian to complement the game he helped develop, about an elite Special Forces unit on a dangerous mission.

Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org