Books for teenagers: from here to paternity

Good dads – and dogs – feature in new novels for teenage readers. Nicholas Tucker rounds them up, from Wild West to Outback

It's Father's Day in this latest batch of teenage novels, with examples ranging from the classic good Dad to the nastiest type of violent, supplanting stepfather. In Benjamin Zephaniah's Refugee Boy (Bloomsbury, £4.99), 14-year-old Alem comes to Britain to avoid the war between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has already claimed the life of his mother. What happens next is related in simple but moving documentary style, as Alem learns to cope first in a run-down children's home and then with kindly foster-parents while he attends school.

One court process follows another, with the arrival of Alem's loving father perversely making everything more difficult. But the two struggle on, supported by a school-based campaign backing their application to stay. With one final tragedy to come, this could have been a bleak, depressing story were it not for Alem himself and his various friends and helpers, whose steadfastness survive through to a final message of guarded hope.

In Stephen Potts's Compass Murphy (Mammoth, £4.99), Joshua is left behind with an evil uncle while his brave father makes one last trip on a whaler bound for the Arctic. When he fails to return, Joshua sails out to look for him, ending up stranded in the ice along with the crew with whom he stowed away. Events then follow thick and fast, all experienced in a 19th-century atmosphere of male camaraderie stripped of any swearing or expression of sexual interest, save for Joshua's own chaste courtship with a girl from a neighbouring Inuit community.

But there is plenty of realism elsewhere, particularly over the bloody business of slaughtering whales, where it is important not to kill them too quickly lest they then sink to the seabed. Written in the spirit of the traditional adventure story, this book offers readers not just a breath but a gale of fresh air.

The atmosphere is contrastingly foetid in Elizabeth Laird's Jake's Tower (Macmillan, £9.99), where the eponymous hero's only comfort is a fantasy about the natural father he has never seen. When he and his mother escape from her brutal partner Danny to a grandmother he also does not know, life greatly improves. But there is still the threat of returning to old miseries, and when Jake's real father also turns up things come to a head. Fortunately for everyone, including readers who by now may be entertaining their own murderous fantasies about the evil Danny, Jake and his fragile mother sort themselves out, with the returning father turning up trumps.

Something of the same sort also happens in Berlie Doherty's Holly Starcross (Hamish Hamilton, £10.99), when the adolescent heroine rediscovers a charming father who somehow never got round to seeing her for eight years. They run away from Holly's cold, disapproving mother, but at this point the element of fantasy wish-fulfilment fails to carry conviction. The best of this author's books are very good indeed, but this is not one of them.

David Klass's You Don't Know Me (Viking, £12.99) starts off as a narrative so drenched in adolescent self-deprecating irony it risks sinking around chapter three. But it soon becomes evident that John is as bored with this routine as everyone else, only using it to stave off full recognition of his wretched domestic plight. Regularly beaten by his mother's lover, shortly to become his official step-father, John thinks of suicide before deciding to stay on for the sake of his unborn sister or brother. His own drama then lurches into farce, following an unsuccessful tryst with the manipulating female class beauty he most fancies. Unlike Catcher in the Rye, with which this all-American story has some similarities, things work out in the end, but not before John nearly dies after a savage beating.

Too laconic ever to become self-pitying, this book gets to all those mock-pessimistic and occasionally tragic corners undreamed of by Harry Potter and his friends. It also deserves to do well with a young audience, some of whom may recognise the truth of such emotions from their own lives.

Other authors get away from soul-searching into stories intent on opening up new horizons rather than endlessly exploring inner worlds. Geraldine McCaughrean's fabulous Stop the Train (Oxford, £10.99) describes a 19th-century community in Oklahoma that is going to fail unless it can resolve its feud with the local railway. The author describes all the different settlers and their children as if she had known them in person. Her story has the appeal of the best Wild West stories without any accompanying melodramatics from cowboys or Indians. For a really good read, look no further than this excellent, unpredictable and engrossing novel from a genuine master of the imagination.

Recommended too is Gillian Cross's extraordinary and ambitious Calling a Dead Man (Oxford, £6.99). Set in the rotting infrastructure of contemporary Siberia, it is a parallel story about an engineer who loses his memory and the two British female relatives, one in a wheelchair, who manage to track him down. The local mafia is also involved, since the engineer knows too much about some plans to blow up a hotel. This story can be read as an adult thriller, with its only concession to younger readers cropping up at the end with some over-explanatory writing. This convincing, dark story is one of the author's best to date.

Louis de Bernières' Red Dog (Secker & Warburg, £10) is an unexpectedly straightforward account of a real animal that charmed and intrigued everyone who knew him in Western Australia between 1971 and his death eight years later. There are no heroics, other than the dog's determination to get acquainted with as many people and travel as many miles as possible. A short glossary of Australianisms at the end, sorting out the Dags from the Drongos, helps lend authenticity to the author's description of the remote mining area forming the background to this affectionate story, illustrated by Alan Baker and most handsomely produced.