Being sent to a remote island with your family is a teenager’s worst holiday nightmare. Julia Bell’s The Dark Light (Macmillan, £6.99, for readers aged 13-plus) mixes religious zealotry with the dawn of love between two girls. Fierce, tender and spiky, it is a stunningly original suspense novel. Meanwhile, Frances Hardinge’s stylishly imaginative The Lie Tree (Macmillan, £6.99, 12-plus) sends Faith’s Victorian family to a place where scandal, murder and lies grow in the darkness.
A different continent is just as challenging, and two fine authors writing for young adults set their novels in (gasp!) Europe. Helen Grant’s astringent Forbidden Spaces trilogy reaches its climax in Urban Legends (Corgi, £7.99, 13-plus) as a group of Flemish teenagers is hunted by a calculating serial killer. Thrilling and chilling – but don’t read it when home alone. Keren David’s This Is Not a Love Story (Atom, £6.99, 13-plus) evokes Amsterdam beautifully as the backdrop to Kitty’s encounters with the moody Ethan and troubled Theo. They share a north London Jewish background, so the wilfully romantic Kitty misreads the clues to Theo’s true nature. Their perspectives are presented with an engaging liberalism, narrative assurance and psychological acuity.
Julia Bell’s The Dark Light. Photo: Macmillan
First love has mythical dimensions, too, and David Almond’s A Song For Ella Grey (Hodder, £6.99, 12-plus) is fired by adolescent passion and tragedy reminiscent of Orpheus and Eurydice. Sarah J Maas’s beguiling reworking of “Beauty and the Beast”, A Court of Thorns and Roses (Bloomsbury, £7.99, 13-plus), has echoes of Keats. Feyre is a near-feral huntress who shoots an enchanted wolf to feed her starving family. She must pay by living with the terrifying faeries for ever – only to fall in love with her cursed captor. Fabulously romantic and verging on the erotic, it demands rereading.
Had Lucy Coats’s Cleo (Orchard, £6.99) focused on friendship rather than romance, it would suit the ill-served eight-plus readership, rather than the 11-plus. Cleopatra is illegitimate and has two Evil Sow sisters competing for the throne of Egypt. Fleeing for her life, our imperious heroine needs her wits, a sexy librarian and the support of the embattled goddess Isis to survive, in this sparkling thriller packed with historical intrigue, humour, loyalty and poison.
Andrew Norriss’s Jessica’s Ghost (David Fickling, £10.99, 12-plus) is about a friendless boy who can see a girl’s ghost. Nobody else can – until he finds another desperately depressed child, and then another. What else do they all have in common? Funny and wise, this cheers and charms – as does Sophie Kinsella’s Finding Audrey (Doubleday, £12.99, 12-plus), whose shy and agoraphobic narrator is really suffering from a mother who believes everything in the Daily Mail.
Lu Hersey’s Deep Water (Usborne, £6.99, 11-plus) gives us an adolescent girl whose hands suddenly bleed salt water, and who must use her supernatural powers to save her mad mother. Like Helen Dunmore’s Ingo series, Hersey’s debut shimmers with Celtic fairy tales, marine marvels, creepy Cornish fishing villages and a fabulous granny; it won Mslexia’s new fiction prize. Younger readers will cheer the reissue of Antonia Barber and Nicola Bayley’s sumptuous picture-book classic about storm-lashed starvation and feline salvation, The Mousehole Cat (Walker, £6.99, five-plus). Essential reading for the British seaside.
Lu Hersey’s Deep Water. Photo: Usborne
Finding that you don’t have super powers can be just as entertaining. Following Nicole Burstein’s Othergirl, David Solomons’s hilarious My Brother Is a Superhero (Nosy Crow, £6.99, ten-plus) concerns Luke, who misses out on his sibling’s alien gifts by sheer bad luck, despite his clueless brother not even knowing how to wear a cape. It takes sibling rivalry to the max.
The father in Phil Earle’s Demolition Dad (Orion, £6.99, eight-plus) destroys buildings for a living. An update of Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World, this story raises a big cheer as Jack’s dad turns his strength to competitive wrestling. Elsewhere, Robin Stevens’s addictive Wells and Wong detective series introduces Hazel’s Chinese Old Etonian father in First Class Murder (Corgi, £6.99, ten-plus), a rumbustious reworking of Agatha Christie’s Orient Express caper.
Nicky and his disabled brother Kenny also love their dad and hope that fishing for treasure will ease their family’s poverty – but there’s murk in human hearts and in a local lake. A gut-wrenching tale of crime and punishment makes Anthony McGowan’s Pike (Barrington Stoke, £6.99) compelling reading for nine-plus. Car-Jacked (Oxford University Press, £6.99, eight-plus) is about a boy genius accidentally kidnapped with his parents’ car. Is he in more danger from asthma, criminals – or his pushy mum? Ali Sparkes’s satirical thriller has spark and heart. Cerrie Burnell’s Mermaid (Scholastic, £6.99) is about a little boy’s friendship with a girl who might be disabled; or a mermaid. It’s gentle and thoughtful, and should touch many four-plus readers.
Virago Modern Classics reissues The Serial Garden by Joan Aiken (£8.99, eight-plus), a long-lost collection of stories about the imperturbable Armitage family, whose small village must endure unicorns, fairy godmothers and more. Inexhaustibly imaginative, Aiken was one of the 20th century’s greatest children’s authors. Witty, zany and entirely sane, this is a necklace of diamonds.
The hero of Space Dog (Jonathan Cape, £11.99) is zooming home alone, but gets a distress call from an enemy Astrocat, then a Mousetronaut. Mini Grey grasps the way small children turn ordinary objects into dramatic dilemmas; her exquisite illustrations honour the imagination of the young. Cakes in Space (OUP, £6.99) is a bonanza for bedtime, with the new Children’s Laureate, Philip Reeve, and the illustrator Sarah McIntyre embroiling the adventurous Astra among spoon-searching aliens. Both fab for five-plus, but don’t expect sleepiness.
Flying Eye Books has become the picture-book publisher to look out for, and Shackleton’s Journey by William Grill (£14.99, seven-plus) has just won the Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration. His expressive, retro style animates history and doughty Antarctic heroism in detail. A pleasure to hold, this is a gift for those who prefer non-fiction – and proper books.
Mike Brownlow and Simon Rickerty’s Ten Little Dinosaurs. Photo: Orchard
Most riotous fun of all is Ten Little Dinosaurs by Mike Brownlow and Simon Rickerty (Orchard, £11.99, two-plus). In a colourful countdown to mischief, the dinosaurs avoid being stomped on, eaten, drowned and exploded. Or do they? Sure to raise a roar of approval long before summer ends.
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