Young adult

The Firebird Mystery might best be described as ''Sherlock Holmes meets Indiana Jones and tackles evil Professor M''.

Ben Silver is at home after school, shooting a stop-motion film on his old video camera.

Naveed is part of an educational series of fictional stories about children's experiences of real wars.

Jay is 13, lives in London and wants to be a rock star. He has made a start, forming a band with three of his mates but the drummer is rubbish.

Viola lives on a sheep farm in the Canterbury foothills with her farmer dad and classical musician mum.

''What are you trying to achieve?''

Take a handful of Mission Impossible, add a pinch of Robin Hood, blend with your choice of hi-tech action movies and you should arrive at a close approximation of the plot of Urban Outlaws.

When Stephen meets his great-aunt Lola for the first time he is a little tense.

''Does a child not recognise her own mother?'' wonders Lucy Sexton during the course of her story.

A collection of love stories . . . for me to review?

On the back cover of this book is a warning regarding the explicit language it contains and it is no window dressing as the main character, 16-year-old Scot Dylan Mint, has Tourette's syndrome.

Joe Riley is an entrepreneurial 12-year-old Sydney lad.

Popular detective-series writer James Patterson tones down his normal crime writing and teams up with Maxine Paetro in his latest ''confession'' series for young adults.

The author has said ''this is a strange monster of a book'', but it's one that's also strangely interesting.

A ship sails through seas thick with icebergs on a mission lasting hundreds of years to preserve the knowledge of its creator, while the world falls into a fear of machines.

Bugs is a 16-year-old who wants to be a lawyer.

Jewel's brother John, known as Bird, died the day she was born.

This is a ghoulish reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's Tinderbox, and together with David Roberts' disturbing illustrations is a riveting read.

Fiction for young adults increasingly targets issues that were once avoided, such as suicide and sexuality.

For any parent, the loss of a child is devastating. Writing about it may be cathartic as French opera stage director Michel Rostain demonstrates in The Son, translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.