YOUNG ADULT

SPELLBOOK OF THE LOST AND FOUND by Moira Fowley-Doyle (Corgi £7.99)

‘OUR plan for the evening is to get excessively drunk and then cry,’ announces Rose to her best friend Olive before they set off for the annual summer party in their Irish village.

But an evening of teenage wildness goes badly awry when something terrible happens to Rose and villagers’ possessions start disappearing.

Then Olive meets three young squatters and together they find an old spell book with a formula for restoring what is lost — but at what cost?

At the same time, pages from a girl’s diary appear in random places, relating a sinister story of blackmail and manipulation — but who is she?

From the author of acclaimed The Accident Season, this complex, ambitious, magical novel is gripping and as the plot unfolds, it is unflinching in its portrayal of sexual experimentation, abuse and damaged lives.

But beneath the darkness shines a life-affirming message of love and redemption.

EVERY HIDDEN THING by Kenneth Oppel (David Fickling Books £10.99)

OPPEL is a brilliantly versatile writer, turning his hand to historical (This Dark Endeavour) or menacing (The Nest) fiction with equal skill.

Set in the late 19th century, this account of a bitter rivalry between two paleontologists determined to discover the biggest dinosaur remains in Canada’s Badlands, is based on the real Bone Wars.

Oppel tells the story through two adolescent narrators, each a child of a single father in the race to uncover the rarest skeleton of all time.

Seventeen-year-old Sam is handsome, charming and the sensible foil to his father’s hotheaded impulsiveness.

Plain but fearsomely intelligent Rachel rejects her ruthless father’s plans for her to marry and keep house. When they meet, the attraction is instant and the book charts their divided loyalties as they search for bones, confront the appalling injustices inflicted upon the First Nations natives of the region and tremble with sexual awakening.