The body of literature popularly referred to as the Arthurian legends has served as starting point for numerous retellings and novelisations, including many intended primarily for young readers: the fine achievements of Susan Cooper, Rosemary Sutcliff and - if we count The Sword in the Stone as a children's book - T.H. White come immediately to mind. To these must now be added Kevin Crossley-Holland's The Seeing Stone (Orion, £10.99 in UK), the first title in a projected trilogy, which not only manages to invest the well-known stories with a colourful inventiveness but also succeeds in doing so in a style which is at once plain and poetic, lively and lyrical.
What we are offered here is, in effect, a tale of two Arthurs. We encounter the first of these, 13-year-old Arthur de Caldicot, as narrator, growing up in the year 1199 in an exquisitely recreated manor house on the Welsh-English border and eagerly training for the move which will take him from page to squire. As boyhood gives way to adolescence, he is presented as having to negotiate many "crossing-places", the most magical of which draws him into the misty domains of his celebrated namesake. The parallels between his two worlds are beautifully sustained in their depiction of shared joys, sorrows and fears and in their combined nobility of aspiration and earthy, frequently ribald, reality.
Joys, sorrows and fears also provide the subject matter for Robert Cormier's Frenchtown Summer (Puffin, £4.99 in UK), a novel (written as prose poem) which may surprise those who associate its author exclusively with his harsher fictions of adolescence. Here, in a series of brief, episodic chapters, he reconstructs a summer in the life of Eugene, a 12-year-old gradually accommodating himself to the realities beneath the shifting surfaces of his small American town. It is in many respects a painful accommodation, characterised by what Cormier in another Frenchtown context designated "golden notes bruised with sadness". But its resolution is masterly in its controlled poignancy: few "teenage" father and son stories are as memorable as this.
We move, in Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth (Puffin, £4.99 in UK), to the Nigeria of the very recent past. The murky politics of General Abacha's dictatorial regime serve as background for this engrossing story, in which, following the assassination of the wife of a radical journalist, their two children are taken to alleged safety in England. For 12-year-old Sade and her younger brother Femi, their stay is a succession of disappointments and frustrations, which not even their father's eventual reunion with them can easily dispel. Striking as the strong narrative is, Naidoo's novel also impresses in its ability to ask significant questions about the prices to be paid for keeping quiet - and for speaking out.
The background to Joan Lingard's Natasha's Will (Puffin, £4.99 in UK) is also political, but the setting here is the St Petersburg of 1917. Or, rather, one of its settings, for this ambitious novel moves between historical Russia and contemporary Scotland: the link is the Natasha of the title. Forced to flee when the certainties of her aristocratic existence are shaken, she eventually settles in Scotland; on her death the McKinnon family's claim to her house seems threatened when her will cannot be found. The ingenuity of Sonya and Alex, the McKinnon children, in pursuing a series of clues to its whereabouts is humorously engaging, but deeper themes of dispossession and loss are handled with equal assurance.
In contrast to the previous books, all of which deal with the past, the present or some bridge between them, the emphasis in Chloe Rayban's Terminal Chic (Bodley Head, £10.99 in UK) is determinedly futuristic. Here, Justine Duval, the self-consciously cooler-than-cool teenage "wild child" of earlier Rayban titles, passes into the cyberspace world of 3001, where her hearthrob, Los, resides. But it is not a journey which brings speedy gratification of any kind, least of all where Justine's quest for love is concerned; is it possible, however, that her exposure to increasingly dystopian experiences might be ultimately rewarded?
Rayban's style is knowing, clever and, above all, very amusing, a clear case of tongue firmly in chic.
Robert Dunbar lectures in English at the Church of Ireland College of Education, Dublin