Just as you’re wondering where the mainstream kids’ stories are that shine a light on Britain’s Asian community – or feature more than just a BAME best friend – two come along at once: nice one, Hodder and Puffin. At the youngest end, where the text can sometimes go sideways, is Zanib Mian’s Planet Omar: Accidental Trouble Magnet (Hodder Children’s Books, illustrated by Nasaya Mafaridik) pitched at the Wimpy Kid audience.

It’s loud, onomatopoeic fun in which familiar perilous set-ups – starting a new school – are casually interspersed with wanting an Xbox for Eidal-Fitr. “I didn’t know the Arabic prayer for being lost with a bully and being chased by a zombie,” confesses young Omar.

On a similar madcap wavelength is Little Badman and the Invasion of the Killer Aunties, by comedians Humza Arshad and Henry White and illustrated by Aleksei Bitskoff (Puffin). Little Badman is “the greatest 11-year-old rapper Eggington has ever known”. He’s a lovable buffoon whose pursuit of fame is derailed when his school is gradually taken over by overweening, food-obsessed “aunties” – relations and non-relations. The aunties are up to something really sinister, however, and the book’s unexpected action-thriller denouement is both wildly over the top and satisfying.

Much of children’s literature sticks to straightforward narratives. But the young are a valid audience for more sophisticated storytelling. Marcia Williams is a minor national treasure; she knows all about retelling with flair. The adapter and illustrator of classics from Greek myth to Dickens in cartoon form, Williams has finally written her own book. It’s an uncommon one, told in breathless diary entries by young Angie Moon, and through a series of rediscovered letters, written to a kitten by a child internee in 1940s Singapore.

My resident nine-year-old really approved of Cloud Boy (Walker); he’s now demanding to see one of the famous Changi quilts, stitched by internees. There’s no false jeopardy here: a main character dies. Angie isn’t sad at her loss, but angry: less storybook, more real.

Another incursion from wartime comes with Girl 38: Finding a Friend (Zephyr hardback). Second-time author Ewa Jozefkowicz packs not one but two stories within a story, which just about works.

Our hero Kat doesn’t feel she’s much of one, dealing with manipulative best friend Gemma, who pressures Kat into victimising Julius, the new boy in school. In her spare time, Kat draws graphic novels – Girl 38 is her braver pen-and-ink alter ego, but it’s the tales of her elderly next-door neighbour – a harrowing account of rescuing a friend from a ghetto in German-occupied Poland – that best illustrate to Kat how to take charge of her own destiny.

Both Cloud Boy and Girl 38 include fictionalised accounts of true witness-bearing. As we know from heaving adult historical fiction shelves, however, history is a rich place in which to set up imaginary camp. Dan Smith’s Dark Ages proto-saga She Wolf (Chicken House) sets up a tantalising mystery: who is our protagonist, anyway? A Norse girl called Ylva vows to avenge her mother’s violent death, battling her way through an icy Anglo-Saxon landscape, her dog at her side. Nothing is as it first appears in this gripping tale of survival, a Northumbrian, female-led analogue of sorts to Michelle Paver.

The very best fiction involves creating believable alternative worlds. Darren Simpson does just that in Scavengers (Usborne), his extraordinary first outing for young readers. The scavengers’ universe is made up of just two: young Landfill and old Bagaboo, who hide from an ill-defined enemy in an Eden Bagaboo has created out of detritus. Loving, but strict, Bagaboo has his own dialect and rules: chiefly, hide and obey. Landfill, though, makes a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries that seed doubt and rebellion, and the reader’s suspicions as to what is really happening gradually crystallise with a mixture of fascination and alarm. It’s a hugely compassionate, sophisticated novel, about inclusion and exclusion, and who – or what – is really crazy.

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