`All the marching, all the fighting, all the dying. What was it all for?" The question asked by young Tom Howlett towards the end of Tom McCaughren's Ride a Pale Horse (Anvil, £6.99) echoes the tone of most children's fiction which takes war as its central subject. In this case, the year is 1798, the battle fields are those of Wicklow and Kildare and the engagements are those between supporters and opponents of the United Irishmen's cause. McCaughren conveys graphically the drama and passion of their encounters but his real skill is in reminding us that beneath the abstraction known as "history" there are ordinary lives - including young lives - whose stories deserve to be heard.
The young life whose story provides the subject matter for Gerard Whelan's A Winter of Spies (O'Brien, £4.99) is that of Sarah Conway. Here, in the Dublin of 1920, her involvement in the War of Independence is to lead to her considering "big things, with capital letters, like Death, and Freedom, and Honour" and in the process to question initial assumptions about all of them. The picture of a city and a period characterised by duplicity and deception is excellently portrayed, as is Sarah herself, a remarkably feisty creation.
As the title of Joan Lingard's Dark Shadows (Hamish Hamilton, £10.99 in UK) suggests, the prevailing atmosphere is one of lingering and threatening blackness. This is contemporary Belfast, where youthful ambitions to discard the bigotry of an older generation are frustrated by adult pettiness and recalcitrance. The restrained optimistic note on which the story ends is proof that complex matters rarely give way to easy solutions, while at the same time being an appropriate resolution for the bridge-building efforts of cousins Jess and Laurie, the respectively Catholic and Protestant protagonists.
Substitute sisters for cousins and swimming for sectarianism and we have the starting point for Jane Mitchell's Making Waves (Poolbeg, £3.99). The attractions - and distractions - of the sporting life and of the social life are here juxtaposed, as we trace the contrasting commitments of Ciara and Sorcha and witness the consequences of their enthusiasms. Mitchell writes with sympathy, but without condescension, about young passions (of various kinds) and her secondary school classroom scenes have an all too recognisable reality. She is good too on those beings called parents, who, in spite of doing their best, never quite have their hopes fulfilled.
When Ricky, the hero of Siobhan Parkinson's The Moon King (O'Brien, £4.99), triumphantly declares in the book's final sentence that "I am the moon king", it is almost impossible not to roar out one's delight in the boy's new happiness.
This original and fascinating story sees Ricky grow from feelings of isolation and rejection to those of belonging and acceptance, a journey in which his discovery of a strikingly beautiful chair acts as a remarkable catalyst. Stylistically and thematically, Parkinson's novel credibly demonstrates the power of the imagination to reshape and transform experience. Full marks, too, for Finbarr O'Connor's cover illustrations.
Take a fairly normal Wexford boy, move him and his family to Tunisia and there is, at the very least, the possibility of cross-cultural fun and games. It is a possibility brilliantly seized in Eoin Colfer's hilarious Benny and Omar (O'Brien, £4.99), where there is hardly a page which will not have a reader laughing aloud. Colfer's plotting is inventive and very well paced and he has a mischievous eye (and ear) for the extravagances of expatriate behaviour. Best of all, however, are the complexities which arise when Wexford hurler and Tunisian wide boy have to overcome their linguistic difficulties.
Robert Dunbar's Secret Lands: The World of Patricia Lynch was published recently