The least successful teenage novels are those so firmly entrenched in the adolescent years - and particularly in their perceived problems - that there is never a suggestion there might be a life beyond them. As real teenagers and those who write best for them are well aware, only the most circumscribed young existences are concerned with merely developmental matters: focus on these exclusively and you end up with all those books which patronise their target audience and win no friends among older readers. Fortunately, there remain some writers who take as their starting point the need to provide the young with narratives which entertain and challenge and with insights which broaden and enrich their evolving experiences and judgments.
A novel such as Margaret Shaw's Walking the Maze (Oxford, £5.99 UK) manages to do even more than meet these criteria. Noting first of all the "warning" on the jacket that "Books are Dangerous. You can get lost in them", we are immediately involved in a narrative raising fundamental questions as to the nature of fiction, its purposes and its potential snares. Its heroine, Annice Campbell, finding no sense of permanence or self-fulfilment in her home or school life, discovers an apparent reality in the landscape and personages of a painting in a local gallery. The moves between her two worlds are plotted by Shaw with exquisite sophistication, her twin stories being a model of effective counterpoint.
The counter-pointing at the heart of Mark O'Sullivan' Silent Stones (Wolfhound £4.99) convincingly takes us into the merging worlds of two seemingly disparate teenagers. One is Robby Wade, trying in the post-Omagh setting of the novel to sort out his own stance in the context of a family who have been tragically split apart by their various nationalist sympathies. The other is Mayfly Blenthyne, daughter of New Age parents who have travelled from England to experience the allegedly curative properties of the ancient "silent stones" on the Wade homestead. In this refreshingly unusual contribution to the often formulaic genre of "Ulster troubles" fiction, O'Sullivan puts people before politics and, wonderfully in the book's closing sentence, the future before the past.
Set also in a contemporary Ireland of atavistic resonances, Kate Thompson's Wild Blood : Switchers 3 (Bodley Head, £10.99 UK hardback) effortlessly travels between realistic and fantasy domains. Here is the story of Tess, about to reach her fifteenth birthday, an event which will terminate her protean ability to "switch" from human to animal and back: what permanent identity will she now settle for? Thompson's skill lies in her depiction of a Co Clare landscape where the mundane and the magical, the natural and the supernatural, are credibly close. As old Lizzie, the seer figure of the novel, points out to Tess, it all depends on whether we believe what we see or see what we believe.
Gillian Cross's clever and inventive Tightrope (Oxford, £5.99 UK) may seem to provide in its very title a telling metaphor for the adolescent period and, indeed, it has some appropriately vertiginous moments. But, more importantly, as its heroine Ashley comes to perceive, the wider world really is a tangled place: first or early impressions are not always correct. There is real literary expertise here, in Cross's handling of such a large cast and in her engaging use of each of them as end-of-chapter commentators. The complex relationship between Ashley and her invalid arthritic mother is explored with fascinating psychological insight, as are their neighbourhood and its dark underside.
`It's very strange, Christopher. This desire we have to be scared, to look into the darkness.' Thus Mr Chambers, a teacher, to Kit, the young hero of David Almond's Kit's Wilderness (Hodder, £4.99 UK), a novel which - at times almost frighteningly - certainly gratifies the desire. The "darkness" here is the darkness of death, which starts off for Kit and friends as only the name of a game, masterminded by Askew, their enigmatic schoolmate. But, as with many childhood games, the apparently playful masks less innocent intent. Almond's gripping story, his restrained, almost matter-of-fact style and the loving evocation of his Tyneside mining community combine to create a novel which, for once, can genuinely best be summed up by the word "haunting".
Finally, a word of strong recommendation for Jerry Spinelli's Wringer just published on this side of the Atlantic (Collins, £4.99 UK), which takes a nine-year-old boy as its hero and traces his journey towards selfhood via a series of ugly confrontations with the agents of cruelty and convention. These attempt to enforce on him the "privilege" of becoming a pigeon-killer, which boys' tenth birthdays traditionally bring in his small American town. The story of how young Palmer resists these pressures makes for a complex, compulsive and touching novel.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin.