In fiction, as in real life, everything is in flux. And yet, somehow, some things remain the same. Books take you places and, in worlds within covers, life's commotion is forgotten. The best of this season's batch tell of challenging journeys and those old reliables: back to the past and into the future. And there are books for budding historians, environmentalists and mathematicians.
Stephanie Dagg has always been popular in our house, where Oh Mum! is more than a title. Her new book Copper Lion (Mentor £4.99) is set five thousand years ago and follows on from her Stone Age novel, Flint Dog. It's a liberating book: all that preoccupies us today is seen in a fresh and different perspective as we follow twins Fair Daughter and Wild Son on their adventures. Sensibly, Dagg opts for immediate and familiar dialogue, and the well-researched material is revealed through situation: green and sparkly rocks melt by the family fire and, hey, copper is discovered. Subsequent adventures focus on an encounter with a lioness, the birth of twins, a new village, three wolves, the smelting of copper for weapons.
Michael Morpurgo's Dear Olly (Collins £9.99 in UK) is both simple and memorable, and its simplicity is its strength. Matt, a straight A student, is uneasy and unhappy until he heads for Africa, where he works in an orphanage run by Irish nuns. Each evening, in clown costume, he entertains the children; dusk is "Funny Man time". Letters and cards from Rwanda to sister Olly connect two different worlds, but Hero the swallow also brings Matt and Olly closer. Morpurgo handles well what could have been a sickly, sugar-sweet story, and his ending combines grim reality and youthful optimism.
Siobhan Parkinson never fails to surprise. Her worlds are so different; her talent so versatile. Call of the Whales (O'Brien, £4.99) with Finbarr O'Connor's brilliantly beautiful cover, brings us to "somewhere north of civilisation" and a boy's "strange, upside-down sort of life". Taig is renamed Tyke in the Arctic, where he goes with his anthropologist father. Inuit customs, folklore, the excitement and dangers of whaling, the magic of the northern lights are all woven into Parkinson's story. The cold, the "retina-stretching" whiteness, the smells, the mosquitoes are vividly evoked in a story where boyish idealism must give way to practicalities: whales and seals and sea creatures are needed for food - "it's all right if we take them for food, as long as we don't take them in anger or for money". An adventure with attitude.
Irish myth and history provide great stories. Every generation, even Celtic Cubs, should know about Cuchulainn and Bairbre McCarthy's fine version of The Ad- ventures of Cuchulainn (Mercier, £4.99) offers the detail and imagery of fine storytelling. Katie O' by Joyce A Stengel (Poolbeg, £4.99) follows Katie from famine-torn Ireland to Boston, where "Irish, Go Home! America for Americans" greets the refugee. Katie's spirited voice tells how she finds work as a kitchen girl and is eventually joined by her family in Boston. Sport is huge, and Neil Arksey's Play- ing on the Edge (Puffin, £4.99 in UK) brings us to 2064. Men in white coats plan to pump 13-year-old football star Easy Linker full of performance-enhancers, and all eyes are on Wembley 2066.
"Football is killing its young stars." Epaulette microcameras beam play to television screens; but behind the scenes, this plot-driven novel fights for fair play. In Frank Murphy's Dark Secret (O'Brien, £4.99) a photo "showed the three of them, himself in his confirmation suit, his mom and his dad, smiling as if tomorrow would be as good as today". But David's mind is now "a dark room of despair". Mom is dead, alcoholic dad is in hospital and David goes to stay with a mystery grandfather in "a glen that had been left behind by the march of time". Here is a novel that offers a clearsighted view of rural, old-fashioned life and shows how the past can colour the present.
Dyan Sheldon's Undercover Angel (Walker, £9.99 in UK) features 12-year-old Elmo, who longs for bland conventionality. His parents are eccentric environmentalists and his friendship with Kuba from Latin America, the angel of the title who can raise the dead, helps to save the woods.
Kieran Fanning's entertainingly busymaking Trapdoor to Treachery (Mentor, £4.99) is a maze of a book and gives gimmickry a good name. Readers follow Sam and Lisa through numerous clues and backwards and forwards.
For the little rocket-scientist, Hans Magnus Enzensberger's The Number Devil, a million-seller in 22 languages, has just been published by Granta (£12.00 in UK). Robert hates maths and teacher Mr Bockel - but meets a Number Devil in his dreams. Difficult concepts are explained clearly. "Hopping" raises numbers to a higher power, "rutabaga" explains the square root, and the ratio of the circumference of the circle to the diameter is easy as pi. More attractive than a textbook, an adult and child could work through this together. It reminded me of how much I'd forgotten.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English in Wesley College, Dublin. His new anthology, Slow Time: 100 Poems to Take You There, will be published shortly by Marino