Here we have five seemingly disparate books linked by genre: fantasy. Yet even fantasy, an often devalued term used to categorise a range of speculative and other fictions, doesn’t quite describe these entertaining and evocative texts. Rather, the common thread running through these stories and uniting them in a continuous and universal yarn is that which weaves its way through many tales: the hero’s journey.

Whether drawing inspiration from epic and mythological pasts or contemporary issues around young people’s search for identity within and against mainstream forms, each story seeks to capture the reality of the timeless and often heroic search for the self using a fantastical backdrop.