With the last zombie tale swept away by a rush of climate-change dystopian sagas, the past year has seen a return to the real world and to relationship-led fiction with the edge of thrillers. Even if there's only a short break from revision, there will still be time for at least one of the pithy but profound choices below to be devoured alongside the chocolate hoard. A change is as good as a rest for an over-challenged brain.
All the Truth That's in Me by Julie Berry (Templar £6.99) delivers dozens of stories in its one stricken voice: that of a voiceless young woman. Judith is abducted from her home in a community of settlers run on puritan lines in a pre-industrial age. When she returns two years later, her tongue has been cut out, and this, along with the assumption that she has been raped, makes her a barely tolerated outcast. Even the man she is in love with at first shows little curiosity or concern about her ordeal. Ever hopeful, she sends her thoughts to him in diary-sized chunks, one incident at a time.
Because she cannot speak, most of her neighbours assume she is deaf and stupid, so she collects their secrets. By watching and listening, she packs her tale with miniature portraits of the townsfolk, each with their own story. The effect is similar to that of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Monologues, which collected the life stories of the dead in a midwest town cemetery. Judith's townsfolk are long dead but they leap off the page in a narrative that is not an appeal for pity but a demand to be heard.
Nathan, the narrator of Sally Green's chilling fantasy thriller Half Bad (Penguin £7.99), was born to be an outcast: he is of mixed black-witch and white-witch parentage, and the white authorities designate him a "half code", with all the oppression that implies. His white-witch sister is part of the system that seeks to eliminate him, and he is in love with another White Witch whose family thrive on tormenting him. In order to access his Gift (magic powers) and defend himself, he has to reach the black-witch leader, who can help him find his father by his 17th birthday.
The witches in their divided world live invisibly alongside mortals, in a way that the Harry Potter tales have made instantly acceptable, but they are recognisably contemporary. Nathan's pursuers enhance their magic with technology, and are more James Bond villains than Dementors. Nonetheless, the thrust of the story is as timeless as Judith's tale.
Dawn O'Porter's novels about Renée and Flo show how friendships can be the only port in a storm for teenage girls whose elders and peers are eager to keep them in their place. Paper Aeroplanes and the sequel, Goose (Hot Key £7.99 each), seem contemporary in Renée and Flo's preoccupations, but the setting – in 1990s Guernsey, before social media – emphasises the isolation the girls feel within their broken families before they find each other. The island adds to the narrative mix, with its co-existence of wealth and poverty, the longevity of reputations and the casual cruelty of young men used to being big fish in a small pond.
Goose sees the girls seemingly destined to grow apart as Flo, set on university, becomes drawn to Christianity (not Catholicism, although she is holding rosary beads on the cover) and Renée turns to more worldly pursuits. Yet the dynamic between them, reminiscent of Cait and Baba in Edna O'Brien's Country Girls, remains a pleasure.
Never Ending by Martyn Bedford (Walker £7.99) is also concerned with a teenage girl's attempt to escape her lot. Shivaun's family is close and loving, and their holidays together indulgent and laughter-filled, until the last one in Greece, when Shivaun builds herself a secret life with a local boy, and tragedy follows. An account of her journey through a residential therapeutic regime is balanced with the memories of the family's final summer together. The pace is perfectly judged so that readers leaf through the holiday album with breath held.
Who is Tom Ditto? by Danny Wallace (Ebury Press £12.99) has a similar air of mystery and of a past being reconstructed, with a booster shot of comedy. Tom's girlfriend disappears and he rejects all the signs that she has left him. When he tracks her to her secret support group, his troubles multiply. Tom's job as a weather reporter on a low-rent radio station is a source of much light relief, in the Alan Partridge mould, and a deterrent to any readers hoping for a media career.
As you would expect from the author of Awkward Situations for Men, the toe-curling embarrassment of much of Tom's life is well realised. It's published for adults (with some after-the-watershed language), and anyone who wants to be an adult could enjoy it, but might well then decide not to bother with adulthood, as Tom has.
Francis, in Matthew Crow's In Bloom (Much-in-Little £6.99), isn't sure if he will make adulthood either, although as a literary super-geek he was probably middle-aged at nine. Diagnosed with leukaemia, his life opens as much as it closes, because he falls for a fellow patient, Amber. Their relationship is micro-managed by their condition but packed with the highs and lows of any love affair. Teens-with-terminal-illness fiction is becoming a sub-genre, but Francis's narrative voice makes this witty, tender and compelling tale stand out.
