Age 10-12: Skulduggery Pleasant By Derek Landy HarperCollins, £12.99
Begin with a death, proceed to a funeral and continue with the reading of a will . . . it may not seem the most cheerful recipe for a children's novel but, as Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant(HarperCollins, £12.99) wittily demonstrates, something very entertaining can develop from the most sombre ingredients.
It constitutes a remarkably accomplished debut for the writer and seems set to be the first Irish children's book since Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowlto break through to international success. Already the publishing world has its money, big money, on him. His publishers have come up with an advance described as being in seven figures - one of the top sums paid to a children's fiction author - for three books aimed at the eight- to 13-year-old age group.
The fun starts when 12-year-old Stephanie, attending the funeral of her uncle, becomes aware of the presence of "the gentleman in the tan overcoat". Bright, independently minded and longing for something to relieve the monotony of her comfortable Dublin life, Stephanie is to discover that her new acquaintance is, in fact, a skeleton, the Skulduggery Pleasantof the title. Before too long he has involved her in his detective work, starting with an enquiry into the circumstances of her uncle's death but spreading into a much wider engagement with the forces of some very ugly specimens indeed. Echoes of Irish myth and folklore abound, sorcery and the supernatural are everywhere, the narrative gallops speedily along and - best of all - the dialogue between Stephanie and Skulduggery crackles with caustic humour.
The Inventors By Alexander Gordon Smith and Jamie Webb Faber & Faber, £6.99
The theme of "you and me against the world" which runs through Landy's novel is set even more deliberately at the heart of Alexander Gordon Smith and Jamie Webb's The Inventors(Faber, £6.99). Here, two clever young children obsessed with their desire to become inventors are drawn into the web of the megalomaniac Ebenezer Saint, himself an inventor of extraordinary ingenuity. For Nate and Cat, it is to be an exhilarating, and instructive, entry to a world where the apparent attractions of endless gadgetry are ultimately seen to mask some very sinister aspirations. The authors' own inventive skills are in evidence throughout and readers tuned into digital screens, minuscule holographic projectors, two-headed goats and, especially, robotics will find themselves well catered for.
The Thing With Finn By Tom Kelly, Macmillan, £9.99
Where The Inventorseventually touches on matters of world destruction and regeneration, Tom Kelly's The Thing With Finn(Macmillan, £9.99) stays much more within the realm of the personal. Ten-year-old Danny relives, with a wonderfully sustained quirky and individual tone of voice, the events which have preceded the death of Finn, his twin, and mingles his sadness with memories of their mischievous pranks and escapades. As Kelly's epigraph - Roethke's "I learn by going where I have to go" - implies, his narrative sees Danny embark on a journey of self-discovery. But it is a literal journey as well and the boy's encounter with an elderly artist, also assuaging a grief, provides a poignant counterpoint to his own experiences.
The Book of Everything By Guus Kuijer, translated by John Nieuwenhuizen Young Picador, £4.99
The realm of the personal is also very much the focus of Guus Kuijer's The Book of Everything(Young Picador, £4.99), which, in spite of its brevity, has a powerful story to tell. Translated from the Dutch, it is set in the Netherlands in 1951, when the country's period of Nazi occupation is still, for some at least, a painful memory. The principal child character is a 9-year-old boy, Thomas, whose father preaches and practises an extremely fundamentalist Bible-based religion, occasionally hits his wife and uses a wooden spoon to chastise the boy. All of this is witnessed and endured by Thomas, who records all of it in his secret notebook, where he has also confided that his greatest ambition is merely to be happy.
It is in the tracking of the boy's pursuit of this happiness that the really impressive dimension of Kuijer's novel resides. Thomas develops a friendship with an elderly woman neighbour - allegedly a witch - whose husband had been a Nazi victim; she is to be of signal importance in bringing the boy to an understanding of fear and of coping with it. His principal resource is his imagination, which houses his extraordinary visions. The poetic beauty of these provides a touching contrast to the harshness of Thomas's reality and yet both are made to blend quite magically in the boy's progress towards fuller awareness of the complexities of life and love.
The Black Book of Secrets By FE Higgins Macmillan, £8.99.
From a novel very specifically set in time and place we move, in FE Higgins's The Black Book of Secrets(Macmillan, £8.99), to one where neither is made quite clear. There are enough hints, however, to see its principal backcloth as Dickensian England and the novel has more than a few whiffs of the currently popular mode of Victorian pastiche. A totally engaging Gothic-cum-Gormenghast romp of a story featuring a cast of grave-robbers, murderers, pie makers (whose pies have strange fillings) and a pawnbroker who trades in people's secrets, this is the sort of book that must have been great fun to write; it is certainly great fun to read.
Robert Dunbar is a commentator on children's books and reading.