Young adult books roundup: contender for 'best of 2019' lists

Despite the heavy themes Scottish author Brian Conaghan tackles in his novels for teenagers, and his background as a teacher, conveying “a message” is never the starting point. At the Children’s Books Ireland conference last month, he spoke about beginning with a character, a voice, and seeing what happens. His latest, (Bloomsbury, £12.99), pulls us in immediately with 16-year-old Maggie’s inner monologue about a man “jabbing the thing in and out of me . . . There’s no screaming my head off or curling my toes in ecstasy. Seriously, hurry up.”

The reveal that this scene is actually about getting a first tattoo is pleasing, and Conaghan continues to offer up a nuanced portrayal of adolescence as we watch Maggie engage in self-harm (“Here’s me thinking that it’s only rich chicks, the lonely and depressed models who do crap like this”), make new friends at art school, and try desperately not to think about Moya, her lost best friend. This “mouth-first-think-later girl” is a brash, funny narrator, with tenderness and rage lurking beneath the surface. It’s impossible not to warm to her.

Aside from the voice, there’s also a psychological shrewdness here in the depiction of relationships, whether that’s a growing tension between Maggie and Moya, or the frustrated-yet-loving dynamic between Maggie and her mother. Conaghan’s teenage protagonists tend to move beyond the stereotypical mode of “I hate my parents and they don’t understand me”, and the result is always rewarding. Add this one to the “best of 2019” lists.

Some writers return to familiar themes, others to familiar worlds. This autumn offers up a cornucopia of delights, most notably Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth (David Fickling Books/Penguin, £14.99). The second volume in the Book of Dust trilogy and the fifth book to feature the much-beloved Lyra Silvertongue is – as befits fantasy – a doorstopper, coming in at almost 700 pages. With the very finest fantasy, though, a reader hardly notices. This is a world to sink into, and Pullman's elegant prose makes it effortless.

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“I used to be young,” Lyra says early in the novel. She is 20 now, an earnest undergraduate in Pullman’s alternate-history Oxford instead of a child wandering through parallel universes. A murder nearby prompts yet another quest for her and her daemon Pan, but things are not nearly as simple as they once were. Jordan College is no longer a safe haven, and Pan and Lyra quarrel and ultimately part ways – leaving Lyra vulnerable as she crosses through Europe and into western Asia.

The physical quest is knotted in with the philosophical one, as with the first trilogy (His Dark Materials) and throughout the novel Lyra hears many whispers and murmurings of “the secret commonwealth” (a title borrowed from a 17th-century text). It is “the world of the fairies, and the ghosts, and the jacky lanterns”; “the world of hidden things and hidden relationships”; “the things that are regarded by clever people as superstition.” (There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio . . .) Lyra has been seduced by the current philosophical craze of rationalism, and it’s led to “the deepest unhappiness she had ever felt”. Are daemons real or a mere psychological projection? Is there more to life than what can be seen and measured?

These are sophisticated questions that shape but never overshadow the story, full of magical creatures and political intrigue as it is. Pullman’s world resonates with our own without directly mirroring it, allowing for relatively subtle commentary on contemporary events (refugees, truth and propaganda, power-hungry men) that will still speak to readers decades from now. Sir Philip (knighted last year) has produced another classic, marred only by the inevitable frustration that comes with the middle volume in a trilogy: that final line of “To be concluded . . .”

The same line appears in Malorie Blackman's new novel, Crossfire (Penguin, £7.99), which draws us back into the world of Noughts (white) and Crosses (black), a clever reversal of our world's privilege structure that was ground-breaking when the first title appeared on shelves in 2001. Blackman's genius in this series has been to create scenarios in which we understand that politics are not abstract but constantly impact on our "real" lives. Here, seemingly everyday teenage problems intensify when rivals for class president, Libby and Troy, are kidnapped. The story moves briskly but the final 50 pages in particular are utterly gripping, making the news that another volume is to come both welcome and frustrating.

News that Rainbow Rowell's Wayward Son (Macmillan, £12.99) was the second in a trilogy broke just before its release, so readers may expect a slight cliff-hanger – although there is some sense of resolution here. Rowell returns to the world of Simon Snow, now deprived of his powers and sporting red dragon wings, and takes him, his best friend (a clever magician) and his boyfriend (a "good" vampire) on a road trip through the "decentralised, unorganised, magickally lawless" United States. This is a playful, lambent take on fantasy tropes.

The best sequels offer up something of the original and something completely new; MA Bennett's DOGS. (Hot Key Books, £7.99) revisits the privileged boarding school of STAGS, home to a powerful secret society, but throws Elizabethan theatre into the mix. Ben Jonson's The Isle of Dogs (performed and then immediately suppressed in 1597) is imagined here as a manuscript found by – and then to be directed by – the protagonist as part of her drama exam. The licence taken here with historical fact is delicious, reminding me of Hilary Mantel's assertion that "for historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography". This is not stuff to quote in exams – but oh, it is wonderful fun.