This year's fiction for the 11-18 age group is striking for three things. The first is the degree to which modern stories and contemporary young adult concerns and anxieties are filtered through or reflected in older forms of story-telling such as folk and fairytales, sometimes to terrifying effect.

The second and one to be warmly welcomed is the increasing availability of really good visual material in terms of graphic novels, illustrated books or even picturebooks for this broad age group.

The third, also to be welcomed, is the increasingly frank embodiment of political ideas and concerns in much of this work. It is important that young people be offered something more than the narcissistic concerns with appearance and surface that much of popular culture seems to assume they want. There's a lot out there besides handsome vampires!

Books, especially in this year of straitened circumstances, offer good value as Irish publishers have kept their prices down and British published books are particularly good value because the fall in sterling is at last reflected in shop prices.

11-13 yrs

Marcus Sedgwick's Revolver (Orion, €11.09), is a thrilling tale set in the Arctic Circle during the first decade of the 20th Century. While the hero, Stig, wakes his father's body, a bear-like man comes to the cabin and threatens him and his sister, Anna. What transpires is a nail-biting tale of horror including threatened rape and murder, because of greed for gold. The issue of gun culture is debated subtly. The tension between images of the gun, gold and the bible sustains this brutal, terrifying story. Because of its realistic violence this is more suited to 13-year-olds than younger readers.

Victor Watson's Paradise Barn (Catnip, €7.99) is an exciting history/mystery/ adventure story set in the Fens of East Anglia during the Second World War. It has a plot rich in carefully interwoven incidents from civilian theft and murder to bombings and the Blitz in London. Its characterisation, most notably of the central three children, Molly, Abigail and evacuee Adam, is subtle, convincing and interesting. Especially striking is the way the children develop and deepen in the course of their adventure.

The action is neatly contained between September and Christmas of 1940. The history of the period is accurate and well integrated into the plot so that the reader never feels he or she is being given a history lesson. Watson evokes sympathy for all his characters, including his murderer and his captured German airmen. Boys and girls would equally enjoy this beautifully written and well-paced humane story for Christmas.

John Gordon's Fen Runners (Orion, €12) is a contemporary yet timeless thriller set in the fenlands against the background of ancient legends and folktales. Again it is a tale for winter, but this time with a supernatural chill in which the young hero and heroine confront and overcome a curse from the past which threatens to drag them into the murky, frozen waters.

Kate Thompson's The White Horse Trick (Bodley Head, €13) revisits New Policeman territory, combining modern Ireland and a fantasy land based on Irish myths and legends. It also deals with modern eco-anxieties, which have featured in much of Thompson's work.

Bernard Beckett's Genesis (Quercus, €12), tells a gripping political story of another kind as it explores old questions about the very essence of life in a technologically advanced utopian world. Shades of Darwin, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brave New World.

Meg Rosoff's The Bride's Farewell (Penguin, €12) takes us back to 19th-Century Hardy-esque world in which Pell Ridley flees from a more or less arranged marriage and takes her chances on the roads of England. This is a gentler and more leisurely tale than her previous books, but it is just as gripping and beautifully written. This has to be one of the best novels of the year.

Esty's Gold by Mary Arrigan (Francis Lincoln, €8) tells a famine story with a difference in that Esty sees the Great Irish Famine from the point of view of relative middle-class comfort before she and her family emigrate to Australia to join in the gold-rush of the 1850s. This is an Irish story that has not really been told to children in this part of the world. Class oppression and exploitation of labour are well depicted both in Ireland and Australia, as are agrarian and labour unrest, but ultimately romance and economic success reward endurance and effort.

Eithne Massey's retelling of The Secret of Kells (€7.99), is a welcome addition to the O'Brien Press contribution to visual story-telling. It is effectively illustrated in striking black and white images by the artists of Cartoon Saloon. The story is well told. My single reservation about this, is why, oh why did Pangur Ban, after more than a thousand years of poetic life as a tomcat, have to have a sex-change to female? Political correctness?

Gerry Hunt's graphic history, Blood upon the Rose: Easter 1916 (O'Brien, €12.99), cannot be accused of undue political correctness and I for one welcome this as a hopeful sign that undue anxiety about telling national narratives to young people might be coming to an end. The story of the 1916 rebellion is accurately and economically told. The point of view is that of the rebel protagonists. BrenB's comic strip illustration is strong, conventional and sober in browns, greens and reds. The faces of the 1916 leaders are recognisably those from photographs.

Deirdre agus Mic Uisnigh by Colman O Raghallaigh (Clo Mhaigh Eo, €11), illustrated by Barry Reynolds and Audrey O'Brien, is an excellent retelling of the tragic story of Deirdre in a modern idiom. O Raghallaigh's use of comic-strip narrative is excellent, and the illustrators -- using strong lines, good variety in the comic-strip form, exaggerated face and body forms, vigorous action, weapons and blood images -- convey the terror and pity of the tale.

Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (Candlewick, €19), retold by Martin Jenkins and illustrated by Chris Riddell, is a worthy retelling of the classic. There is sheer fun here in both the language and the rich, varied illustration. Affection, tenderness and sadness are also beautifully conveyed. Great for winter's evenings.

Shaun Tan's Tales from Outer Suburbia (Templar, €15) is a very contemporary and surreal collection of stories and yet like Cervantes, Tan invites us to contemplate the strange in the world that we think of as ordinary. Outer suburbia might as well be outer space. The strangeness is revealed in the extraordinary dreamlike illustrations more than in the text. Teenage readers would really enjoy the way in which respectable suburban life is subversively deconstructed here.

14-17 Years

Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels (David Fickling, €15) is very definitely for the older end of the YA spectrum. It is based on a variety of folk and fairytales, including Snow White and Rose Red, reinstating their horror and brutality. It is a tale of incest, gang rape, dwarfs, witches, bears, and wolves. There are magical transformations and movements between parallel worlds. It is a powerful and imaginative if disturbing tale which asks profound questions about human nature and the relations between the sexes.

Melvin Burgess's Nicholas Dane (Andersen Press, €13) draws on Dicken's Oliver Twist to tell a modern tale of childhood cruelty, institutional neglect and violent sexual abuse, including gang rape, of young boys in Liverpool. In spite of some stereotyping this hard-hitting story is suitable for the older reader and seems sadly pertinent to Irish readers just now.

Siobhan Dowd's Solace of the Road (David Fickling, €13) is a powerful story that brings its teenage heroine, Holly/ Solace, on a long journey from London to the Irish coast and from despair to self-acceptance. It is the late O'Dowd's best and least compromising story. A gripping plot is very well controlled. The very worst kind of betrayal, that by a mother, is confronted. Holly comes through by her own strength and the kindness of strangers. My best novel of the year for older teens.

Patrick Ness's The Ask and the Answer (Walker, €15) is a very exciting and satisfying sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go.

Two books which treat the Second World War and the Holocaust in a serious and thoughtful way are Morris Gleitzman's Then, which comes in a single volume with its prequel, Once, (Penguin, €10.99) and the extraordinary, powerful and truthful Auslander by Paul Downwell (Bloomsbury, €7).

A handful of books which confront contemporary issues well are Narinda Dhami, Bang Bang you're Dead (Corgi, €7), which deals with the disturbing issue of high-school mass killings, Anna Perera's Guantanamo Boy (Puffin, €8), which tells the harrowing story of an English Muslim boy who is wrongly imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo, and Randa Abdel-Fattah's story Where the Street Had a Name (Scholastic, €8), which confronts the situation of the Palestinian people in the occupied territories with sympathy and courage. From the other side of the Middle Eastern conflict comes the graphic novel Waltz with Bashir by Ari Folman and David Polonsky (Atlantic Books, €14.95). It tells the terrible story of the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon from the point of view of an Israeli soldier. This searing anti-war work, for the strength of its story and its powerful illustration, deserves to be widely read by today's young adults and adults alike and to become a classic of the genre.

A graphic novel of a very different kind is The Dream Hunters by Neil Gaiman and P Craig Russell (Vertigo, €17). It tells a moving story of a monk and a fox/woman set in Japan. Based on folk stories, this is a magical tale in which the transformative power of love is vindicated in the superb narrative and in the exquisite artwork inspired by Japanese painting; a gift to cherish this Christmas.

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki's Skim (Walker, €12), is a wonderful graphic novel from Canada. It shows what art can do with the seemingly banal chick-lit adolescent ingredients, including the diary form. Skim, the disaffected 16-year-old Goth heroine, negotiates her way through the perilous waters of friendships made and broken, suicide of a classmate, gay and straight love, broken homes, broken arms and broken hearts, all against the background of school and home and the change from Canadian autumn to winter and Christmas.

The text is beautifully written, capturing the crudity of teenage language and the sensitivity of teenage thought and feeling. The wonderful graphic images are a perfect match, whether representing cigarette-smoking teens or the exquisite urban and rural landscapes in stark-clear black and white, in a fusion of Western comic and Japanese art forms.

There is a subtle multicultural subtext in that Skim is depicted as Japanese-Canadian and both she and a Vietnamese student experience exclusion, possibly on the grounds of race. Girls from 14 up deserve to have access to a beautiful and true book like this.

Celia Keenan is a senior lecturer in English and director of the MA in children's literature at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra

- Celia Keenan

Sunday Independent