2016:1

It’s a kind of community rarely portrayed in literature.

A novel of violence and feelings.

Virdborg’s whole book can be read as a descent into hell.

At a staff meeting, discussing ways to tackle the persistent issue of shoplifting, a security guard suggests the store deal with the problem by making culprits wear a sign saying ‘I am a thief’.

A secret concealed in the communal laundry: a tub full of pulsating black goo that craves blood and offers in return irresistible mystical transports.

Something rotten at the heart of the Finland-Swedish academic and literary establishment.

Now Masha, Tolstoy’s favourite child, comes into focus, completing the Russian triptych.

What remains from Ray Bradbury’s story is an existential ambivalence about the end of a life, and of the novel itself in the face of inevitability.

Maria (Mary to her friends), a 23-year-old architecture student, has just discovered that she is expecting a baby.

A carefully made documentary in print: two skilful communicators have joined forces to stimulate readers into learning more about their special subject.

‘How grandiose, eccentric, depressive, suicidal, bizarre, queer or sexually affirmative can a woman be before she is labelled insane?’

Who but an artist could better interpret for the rest of us just what it is like to be mentally ill?

A particular strength is his description of how someone in a crisis observes small and seemingly unimportant details and clings to them, to protect himself or herself against a greater evil.

That magical, belly-flipping fizz of first love.

Jessica Schiefauer’s thorough examination of neo-Nazis, hate crime and homoeroticism resists simplification and reminds us of the thin line we all tread when we choose how to treat each other.

Doris is a determined little girl who knows her own mind. And what she wants is to finish the civil engineering project she’s working on in her sandpit, not to go out for afternoon tea – particularly when that means putting on a pink flouncy frock rather than her favourite sailor suit.

Joyful purples and blues dominate the second phase of the journey, the sea crossing, with its gloriously calm starry skies and tranquil moon.

The Katitzi books expose readers to a way of life and to a period of harsh and disturbing stereotyping and discrimination of the Romani people that many may not know much about.

This is the kind of book likely to elicit the attention of gatekeepers in the world of YA fiction.