Owen Craig is a bit of a teenage tearabout, breaking into abandoned buildings and spraying graffiti here and there. A delinquent, but a fairly minor one, but after a weird thing happens one night out on the mud, he is transformed into... a superhero who can do things with mud! With bank robbers on the loose, a mysterious woman who appears and reappears, a mysterious and sinister man who seems to know the answers to questions Owen doesn't know how to ask and a flying metal owl thing with claws all turn up to make Owen's life intersting. Where did these powers come from? What really happened to Owen out in the mud? These and more questions are not answered in this volume! But a whole thing with the bank robbers and Owen's dad the police chief and a guy who can control water and some detention keep things lively for the reader, all presented with Paul Grist's customary skill and humour.

Coming of age on the moon, when the great adventure is over and the accomplishments of the parents completely overshadow the lives of the children. Our hero feels trapped, oppressed and monitored and searches for a chalenge that’ll make his life worthwhile. An effective story from the late, lamented Ford.

Thoroughly enjoyable fantasy romp from the mistress. Jones doesn’t subvert conventions, either: she just ignores them. Anything can happen, and her stories can go anywhere, and the whole solar system and the entire world of myth and magic are the playground in this novella.

I miss my old edition of Elidor but it seems to have vanished along with its wonderful illustrations. Elidor, that strange halfway-house book between Garner's more conventional children's fantasies and his truly powerful, timeshifting work in Owl Service and Red Shift.

Four children find themselves almost randomly in an urban wasteland and pass through to another world. When they return they are carrying four Treasures which must be hidden and protected. As time goes on, the children begin to forget and rationalise their experience, but forces on Elidor are trying to break through, homing in on the Treasures themselves.

Elidor is portal fantasy as ghost story. The book is full of strange phenomena: massive build-us of static electricity, shadows on walls, mysterious figures on the porch and eyes peeking through letterboxes. A message comes through on a spiritualist's planchette. It is spooky and unnerving and haunting in every sense of the word. It is also tight, spare and economical, without a wasted word or scene, and the terrible sacrifice at the end has always stayed with me.

I have read a lot of books this year, but this may be the most extraordinary. Four novellas, each about a child in a different generation of the same family, at a moment of discovery or grace or insight, intersected by people and words, places and ideas, shapes and histories, resonant with the shared myth of family and craft.

There are people who write spare prose that is sharp and precise and economical; hard-boiled sometimes. Alan Garner's prose is stripped and polished, but the result is beautifully, poetically evocative. Language for Garner is not just surface, it is something that goes all the way down, sedimentary geological layers, with the spoken sounds and read letters merely the visible features of millennia of history expressed unwittingly and perceived unknowingly. There is no sense of loss or grief in these books as things pass and people pass (though I cried twice reading it) but the sense that all things exist in their brief bright moment, and survive in the language and the actions and the genes of their ancestors and in the very bones of the place where they lived, shaping the lives of those who come after in invisible ways, only manifesting in rare secret physical forms: a name carved on a hidden block in a church steeple or a clay pie unearthed with the potatoes. So we live and commune with what has gone before, ignorant but not ignored. So we become the place where we live. Marks carved in books of stone, with love.

Atmospheric tale of an old pagan practice revived for a summer fete, summoning dangerous old forces that focus on a young outsider in a rural village. Marvelous writing evokes the rich summer countryside as well as loneliness, alienation, friendship and strange dark undercurrents. Visitor Lucy watches her one friend, square peg Kester, almost willfully become the prey and tries to save him from himself and from the hunt. The writing is of a particularly high standard and the whole thing is a chilling little read.

Though originally released separately, the five editions combined here form one stonkingly well-written, structured and plotted little children's fantasy novel. Jared, Simon and Mallory stumble across a whole hidden world of faeries when they find a Field Guide to fantastical things, and soon they are beset by boggarts and goblins and trolls and ogres and all manner of frightful (and delightful) things, making their life interesting. Told from the point of view mainly of Jared, with his hot temper and anger issues getting him into trouble, it's a marvelous, pacy adventure full of magical and monstrous creatures. This edition, as well as being the complete story with lots of illustrations, includes sketches and lost chapters and fun tributes from other artists. Really quite brilliant.

Mosca Mye, educated ragamuffin, Eponymous Clent, cunning rogue, and Saracen, goose, cast out of one city after causing disturbances and revolutions, find their way into another, with even more calamitous results. The city of Toll has a day face and a night face, and they are kept strictly apart, but there are kidnappings afoot, and Mosca and Clent are right in the middle of them, and before long, Mosca is heartily sick of both Toll-By-Day and Toll-By-Night, an ingeniously horrible system of repression and control and exploitation. But what can a girl, a con-man and goose do against the fearsome might of the jinglers?

A well-conceived and ingenious fantasy that mixes dark elements with comic wit and a likable protagonist and a well-rounded menagerie of supporting or opposite-of-supporting characters. I really hope there's another one of these at some point.

Solveig's father leaves her with her step-mother and step-brothers to rejoin his old leader Harald in Miklagard. Solveig sets out to follow him, an impossible journey across half the world. Crossley-Holland is one of the best story-tellers out there, with an instinctive appreciation for the role of myth and spirituality and poetry in everyday lives. Therefore the journey is vivid and fraught and wonderful, full of living, breathing characters and sudden, horrible dangers, hidden threats and tensions amidst joy and laughter and fellowship. Beautifully written and thoroughly alive, this is a gem of a book.

Mildred wins a magic pencil and draws herself up a very weird dog. Children are disappearing and a beast is on the loose, attracting the attention of a famous hunter. Jack is being bullied and someone burns down the cricket pavilion, and it's more hilarious and charming and slightly surreal antics from the rival mystery solving teams of Tackleford. One of my favourite webcomics has produced what are now some of my favourite books.