Collins Big Cat supports every primary child on their reading journey from phonics to fluency. Top authors and illustrators have created fiction and non-fiction books that children love to read. Book banded for guided and independent reading, there are reading notes in the back, comprehensive teaching and assessment support and ebooks available. Finny is a rare fairy fish living on a Caribbean coral reef. He has never seen another fairy fish, until one day he sees himself in a conch shell mirror and realizes he is different from everyone else. Finny believes he is ugly and worthless, but his friends persuade him to leave the reef and journey to the deep sea where an elder dolphin explains to him that difference it to be celebrated. Finny the Fairy Fish deals with themes of tolerance, belonging and celebration of diversity, using a Caribbean coral reef as the setting. The book introduces the types of creatures living on a reef and some of the threats facing the sea. It also encourages children to identify and talk about emotions. Purple/Band 8 books offer developing readers literary language, with some challenging vocabulary. Ideas for reading in the back of the book provide practical support and stimulating activities.

Told in two voices, educated Jamaican English and the nation-language of the people, this dramatic novel tells the story of a well-meaning, middle-class woman and a young boy from the ghetto whom she desperately wants to help. Alternating between the perspectives of the woman and the boy, the story engages with issues of race and class, examines the complexities of relationships between people of very different backgrounds, and explores the difficulties faced by individuals seeking to bring about social change through their own actions. The dramatic climax and tragic choices made grow from the gulf of incomprehension between middle-class and poor Jamaicans and provide penetrating insights into the roots of violence in impoverished communities.

Gone to Drift is an award-winning coming-of-age adventure story set in Jamaica. Life gets even tougher for Lloyd, a boy from a fishing village, when his grandfather goes missing at sea - 'gone to drift' as the local fishers say. Lloyd sets out to find him but no one will help except an uptown girl who studies dolphins, his best friend Dwight and - just perhaps - a mad man called Slowly on a sun-baked beach. Truth? Respect? Survival? Remembering what Maas Conrad had taught him about the old ways, Lloyd discovers that the enemies of the sea - and his grandfather - are closer to home than he could imagine.

It is 2084. Climate change has made life on the Caribbean island of Bajacu a gruelling trial. The sun is so hot that people must sleep in the day and live and work at night. In a world of desperate scarcity, people who reach forty are expendable. Those who still survive in the cities and towns are ruled over by the brutal, fascistic Domins, and the order has gone out for another evacuation to less sea-threatened parts of the capital. Sorrel can take no more and she persuades her mother, Bibi, that they should flee the city and head for higher ground in the interior. She has heard there are groups known as Tribals, bitter enemies of the Domins, who have found ways of surviving in the hills, but she also knows they will have to evade the packs of ferals, animals with a taste for human flesh. Not least she knows that the sun will kill them if they can't find shelter. Diana McCaulay takes the reader on a tense, threat-filled odyssey as mother and daughter attempt their escape. On the way, Sorrel learns much about the nature of self-sacrifice, maternal love and the dreadful moral choices that must be made in the cause of self-protection.

Set in Jamaica, this novel discusses the island's story of slavery and independence from a personal perspective, shifting from an 18th-century narrative to one in the 1980s. Leigh McCaulay left Jamaica for New York at the age of 15 following her parents' divorce. In the wake of her mother's death another 15 years later, she returns to the island to find her estranged father and the family secrets he holds. As Leigh begins to make an adult life on the island, she learns of her ancestors: Zachary Macaulay, a Scot sent as a young man to be a bookkeeper on a sugar plantation in 18th-century Jamaica who, after witnessing and participating in the brutality of slavery, becomes an abolitionist; and John Macaulay, a missionary who came to Jamaica in the 19th century to save souls and ended up questioning the foundations of his beliefs. Leigh struggles with guilt and confusion over her part in an oppressive history as she also encounters the familiarity of home and the strangeness of being white in a black country. Examining themes of homecoming, belonging, love, and redemption, this novel--loosely based on the author's own family history--explores how individuals navigate the inequalities and privileges they are born into and how the possibilities for connectedness and social transformation occur in everyday contemporary life.