Pan Macmillan

Fiona Wood’s second novel addresses a theme that is common in Young Adult fiction: the loss of innocence. Wildlife, a cleverly composed coming-of-age novel, introduces the reader to the world of Crowthorne Grammar’s outdoor education campus at Mount Fairweather. Although it revisits the character of Lou from Wood’s début novel, Six Impossible Things (2010), Wildlife is an absorbing, stand-alone book.

Friendship between women is ideal. It is affectionate and nurturing, founded on generosity and mutual love. It is intimate and loyal, because you can tell your best friend anything and she won’t betray you. It lasts a lifetime.

Reading two books about Gina Rinehart back to back is far from edifying. So rich, so controlling, so opinionated, so entitled – and these are among her less objectionable qualities, as described in the two biographies published since she burst into the headlines amid reports of family litigation, media buy-ins, and escalating wealth. Indeed, whatever she did would captivate widespread interest, given that her worth ballooned from a tidy $900 million in 2006 to $20 billion this year.

Just as God created the earth in seven days, Simmone Howell’s Everything Beautiful rebuilds the life of sixteen-year-old Riley Rose in a week spent at a Christian summer camp.

Two years after the death of her mother, Lilith (an allusion to Adam’s first wife), atheist Riley has become the quintessential bad girl – smoking, drinking and getting arrested. On the advice of her father’s new girlfriend, Riley is sentenced to a seven-day stint at the Spirit Ranch holiday camp, with nothing but a new hairstyle, a copy of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and, courtesy of her best friend, a bus ticket home.

Pertinent to the meaning of reality television is the understanding that it focuses on real life. There are no actors, no scripts and no staged events to provoke drama; the camera simply captures life as it happens, and we become ‘peeping toms’ for the duration of the programme.

Lucy’s parents have separated, and she is off to London to visit her mother and her new family. She is fortunate to be able to fly: the world is in the grip of perpetual rain, and travel is restricted. Some inhabitants have become amphibians; others live in government camps. But Lucy’s fate is rather more intriguing. A cloud boy (seen only by Lucy) appears outside the plane window before being snatched away by a ghoulish cloud creature. As they wait in the rain at a bus stop in London, Lucy and a boy called Daniel are whisked up to Cloudland by a peculiar woman called January. There it is the task of Lucy, Daniel and assorted Cloudlanders to rid the heavens of the evil Kazia and thus stop the rain on Earth and prevent the onset of an ice age – an interesting premise.

Childhood is full of revelatory moments; sometimes shocking instants of understanding that people, events and relationships are not as they seem. They can happen in adulthood too, but those in childhood can have an intensity that makes them deeply formative. They might be subtle eye-openers or life-changing epiphanies, but they all cause a shift in perspective that changes one’s perception of the world. These six new books contain transformative moments for their protagonists, from the realism of family secrets to the fantasy of high-adventure mysteries.