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A range of books for young adults includes topics that will be shocking to readers – and their parents, writes ROBERT DUNBAR

THERE IS a moment in Tabitha Suzuma’s Forbidden(Definitions, £6.99) when Maya, its 16-year-old heroine, says to her friend Francie, “So nothing is taboo any more?” It is a question which must occur increasingly to anyone keeping abreast of developments in what we have come to designate “Young Adult” fiction and one which will definitely surface in a reading of Suzuma’s own novel. For Maya’s query arises from the fact that she has fallen passionately in love with her brother Lochan, one year her senior, an obsession which in its move into a fully consensual sexual relationship becomes the focus of what – predictably perhaps – grows into a harrowingly tragic story.