Rowan Scrivener hears a voice, and sometimes, when stressed or scared, the voice makes him do things he never would normally, like the time he slammed the lid of the piano down on his sister's hand, breaking three of her fingers. It is 1939, war has just broken out, London is under blackout and schizophrenia is poorly understood. Rowan is sent to a hospital where he is to undergo a radical new therapy, administered by a German doctor.

What a brilliant, beautiful, heartrending book. Its power lies in its understated humanity. Rowan's is a tiny, surely insignificant drama in the face of the coming global conflict. He is not treated harshly or cruelly, but by today's standards it is clumsy, callous, insensitive and even contemptuous. Set against the scale of human suffering, however, Rowan seems downright lucky. About halfway through, in a scene of quiet devastation, we discover why this book has been set when it has and why the doctor is German, and suddenly every tiny mistreatment is set in sharp relief, not diminished but accentuated, as these vulnerable people are horribly exposed in the face of indifference or fear or spite at the hands of others.

This isn't a tale of plucky rebellion against institutional authority, it's a story of people struggling against an illness they cannot understand trying to get better with the help of people with limited insight, and who do not understand the limits of their vision.

Yeah, I cried.

Fast paced tale, one of those chance-encounter-that-changes-everything narratives. Ellis is 17, just finished school, on the brink of adulthood, thrilling to the possibilities, still coping with the suicide of is best friend. He meets Jackie, who persuades him to drive them to a party, where they meet two sisters and return to the motel where they live called the Land Of Smiles. This is a whole different world for Ellis, a world of the rejected and the wounded and the disreputable. Before the 24 hours is up, Ellis races through a whole lifetime's worth of experiences, including love, rejection and a car chase. It's a great read about the darker, more dangerous side of life, a microcosm for the recklessness of youth haunted by death and the burgeoning notion of taking responsibility, both for yourself and others. if that sounds a bit po-faced, it's not, it's just that Mahy manages to pack a lot in there without making it look packed at all.

This was the fourth book in Aiken's James III sequence, but chronologically, it's a prequel, self-contained and entirely satisfying all on its ownsome. Full of wonderful Welsh dialect and phrases, it's an adventure set in the valleys and mountains and caves around Fig Hat Ben, the Whispering Mountain of the title.

We join the action more or less in full swing. Our hero Owen Hughes is bracing himself for a confrontation with some bullies, but soon has a lot more on his mind as the local Marquess has taken a hankering to take possession of the battered old golden harp found by Owen's grandfather, the curator of the local museum. Two thieves hired for the task make off with the harp, kidnapping Owen and making it look as though he is responsible. Aided by his friend, the herbalist daughter of an itinerant poet and an old wandering monk, Owen must retrieve the harp, capture the thieves, defeat the evil nobleman, help the mysterious people who live in the caves, rescue the Prince Of Wales and persuade his crotchety grandfather that he's not himself a villain.

Pure joyful adventure and escapism, this is thrilling and exciting and adventurous and packed with characters and incidents and ideas and mystery and atmosphere and all manner of good things. Fantastic.

A lively, fast-moving tale from the Wolves Of Willoughby Chase sequence that takes place just after The Stolen Lake. Dido is still trying to return to England on The Thrush, but the ship is diverted and sent chasing after the wandering Lord Herodsfoot, who travels the world collecting games to entertain the ailing King James. Dido and co finally track him down on the Pacific island of Aratu. All is not well on the island, however. The putative ruler, John King is unwell and his ruthless brother has some nefarious plans that mean trouble for the indomitable Dido.

A lively, endearing novel, set in Blaylock's version of California from The Digging Leviathan and revolving around the many peculiar abilities and affinities of the quasi-mermaid Peach clan. Eleven year old Kathleen Perkins, or just Perkins, trainee cryptozoologist, lives with her uncle and her cousins on the remote Californian coast. Mysterious strangers with ill intent threaten their happy state: a woman intent on taking them back to their Aunt and a man intent on stealing papers and maps from their uncle's museum. Soon they are of on a hairy and scary and wild adventure that will take them to an ice island on the foggy Grand Banks and the mysterious mansion of the Peach family on the shores of Lake Windermere.

Written as for a mid-range or Young Adult audience, Blaylock's world proves ideal for excitable and imaginative young minds. Perkins is a perceptive, intelligent, honest-to-a-fault narrator, and her odd and infuriating cousins are a great par of companions.

I was given this by my editor to show me what could be done in a mid-grade novel, and I'm bloody glad of it. Lawrence acknowledges her debt to Charles Portis, as well she should. True Grit is one of my favourite novels, and this is a worthy homage. Our young protagonist, PK, is half-Indian, autistic and on the run after their adoptive parents are horribly murdered by the deadly desperados. There follows a wild chase from the small town where PK lives via the back of a stagecoach, through the Chinese laundries, saloons, bordellos, newspaper offices, muddy streets and shops of Virginia to the bottom of a pitch-black mine-shaft, with a few rare pauses for breath to ponder the mystery of what they're after and why and encounter a few of the colourful folk living there, some considerably less trustworthy than others. Vividly entertaining, this manages to stay grounded while keeping things age-appropriate with a few sly wry nods to grown-up readers.

It's been a good while since I read the first book in this series, but I didn't have too many difficulties picking things up. This really is the far side of the world from Alan Garner's increasingly atmospheric and enigmatic style of fantasy. This is a sturdy, intricate piece of world-building, fully grounded and downright anti-romantic in its, for a narrow sense of the word, realism. There's the geography, all connected, the flora, the fauna, the city, the academic extension to the city, the economics, the politics, the corruption and crime and bustling throng of diverse species, there the mad science that's indistinguishable from magic and here's danger, madness and death - often hideous and bloody - around every corner: basically it's Fritz Lieber's Lankhmar and Jack Vance's Dying Earth and you could probably talk knowingly about George RR Martin for kids if you really wanted to.

Some really quite amazingly horrible stuff happens in the course of this adventure. There's is intrigue and betrayal, but there are deaths and murders and mutilations that were either shocking or gratifying in a book for children, I'm not sure which, and it's probably both. The writing makes sure it all goes down easily, however - a tad too easily, perhaps. One is invested in the world and in the story, but never quite the characters. The kind of smooth clarity of the prose that explains complex ideas and gruesome deaths with deceptive simplicity tends to describe characters and their emotions and personalities without ever quite making them really come alive to the reader.

Not that that'll stop me sailing off into the next one.

YA from Lansdale, a hugely readable Depression era adventure that sees three Oklahoma orphans steal a dead man's car and set out to find somewhere, anywhere better. The discipline imposed by the YA tag makes Lansdale's prose and storytelling gifts shine, but adult readers will miss the profanity and violence, and their absence here serves to remind that in a Lansdale book, they might be crude and nasty but they are never gratuitous.