Maya Linden

In the essay ‘Pay Attention to the World’, written shortly before her death in 2004, Susan Sontag argues that fiction is ‘one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives … [it] educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us how to be in the world’. While Sontag’s insight recognises the power of literature in general, the qualities she identifies are particularly significant in young adult fiction. Genius Squad and At Seventeen are two examples of the ‘rite of passage’ novel, where adolescent characters’ quests for self-discovery illuminate parallel themes in the lives of teenage readers.

Drift is a complex and ambitious piece of young adult fiction that attempts, and partially achieves, an exploration of myriad existential themes. Through the tale of Undine, the adolescent daughter of an idiosyncratic family, claustrophobically trapped between magical realms and reality, Penni Russon embarks on a sometimes baffling journey through parallel universes, string theory and the physics of chaotic coexistence.

Fabienne Bayet-Charlton’s Watershed begins, ‘… such is the realm of water. It cradles yet suffocates. Warms and cools us. Sustains, nurtures and kills us.’ Indeed, the bonds and binaries of the element are central to this narrative – not simply the presence or lack of literal water, but also fierce emotional currents that threaten to submerge its main characters.

Set in contemporary South Australia’s Murraylands, Watershed centres on ex-champion swimmer Eve Buenetti, who is lost in a barren psychological terrain following the presumed drowning of her son, David. The novel also explores her husband Marconi’s response to the tragedy, and the tangled rivalry and sexual tensions between Eve, Marconi and his brother Victorio, the womanising town mayor. As in many explorations of rural communities, tangential storylines evolve, providing a break from the Eve–Marconi narrative and insight into other town dwellers, such as cryptic newcomer Jasmine.

‘Reading provides a temporary stay from hate and anger. From pain,’ proposes Celeste Walters’s teenage protagonist, Josh Sim. Yet, as a novel, Deception is far from escapist literature. Despite being set in an imaginary city, this is not the material of fantasy: Walters’s work reveals the world as a gritty, desolate and unjustly cruel place.

‘It is in love that violent desires find the greatest satisfaction,’ wrote Stendhal in On Love (1842).    Though distanced by land, sea and centuries, Sophie Cunningham’s début novel, Geography, gives contemporary testimony to the same enduring claim. Set for the most part among the suburbs and landmarks of Melbourne and Sydney during the 1990s, Geography travels back and forth in time and place between Los Angeles and Sri Lanka, establishing an expansive mise en scène for this explosive meditation on the complexities of love, sex and self-destruction.