Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder was last year’s big breakout debut, introducing schoolgirl turned detective Pippa Fitz-Amobi. The sequel, Good Girl, Bad Blood (Electric Monkey, £7.99, May), is set one year later. Pippa and Ravi Singh have released a true crime podcast about the murder and are insistent their detecting days are behind them – until a local boy goes missing. Jackson ensnares readers in another highly addictive web, woven from the dark shadows of small-town secrets.
More mystery from Akala, the Bafta-winning musician and founder of the Hip-Hop Shakespeare Company, in The Dark Lady (Hachette, £12.99). In the brutal streets of Elizabethan London, Henry is a brown-skinned boy thief in the Devil’s Gap, the city’s most notorious slum. He survives on his wits and tough moral choices, and an exceptional secret gift. Themes of race, class and identity, familiar from Akala’s bestselling adult book Natives, are driven by powerful prose in an exhilarating, magic-laced adventure.
With two Carnegie medals to his name, Patrick Ness is a literary giant in young adult fiction, and his books remain gloriously original and unpredictable. His latest, Burn (Walker, £12.99, May), is set in an alternative 1950s America, where Sarah and her father reluctantly hire a dragon to work on their farm. The dragon, Kazimir, comes not with farmwork on his mind but a world-changing prophecy. What follows is a wild ride of fanaticism, redemption, assassins and dragon-worshippers. Mind-bending in the best possible way.
Dystopian fiction may cut too close to the bone for some in 2020, but the genre is seeing a resurgence. Fans of The Hunger Games and Maze Runner should look no further than Ben Oliver’s The Loop (Chicken House, £7.99) for their next fix. In a near-future world, 16-year-old Luka Kane is on death row in a high-tech prison controlled by artificial intelligence, where inmates can delay their execution by submitting to medical experiments. Rumours of a war kickstart an adrenaline-fuelled breakout. Thrilling and terrifying in equal measure.
Jacqueline Wilson first wrote for young teenagers in the Girls in Love series. Now, in Love Frankie (Doubleday, £12.99), 13-year-old Frankie is dealing with her mum’s multiple sclerosis and navigating her new feelings for a girl in her class. All the exhilaration and confusion of first love is here, full of tender, awkward truths. Wilson’s books – addressing topics such as divorce, mental health and living in care – have been subject to much hand-wringing over the years, but nobody chronicles the messy complexity of modern girlhood in quite the same way.
Finally, goodness knows teenagers need some laughter in these strange times, and Pretty Funny by Rebecca Elliott (Penguin, £7.99) promises to be a balm. Our heroine Haylah, a self-styled “Big Funny Girl”, juggles her chaotic home life with dating dilemmas, body positivity and her dream of becoming a comedian. Fresh, contemporary and genuinely funny, there’s plenty here to charm fans of Louise Rennison and Holly Smale.
The Loop by Ben Oliver (Chicken House Ltd, £7.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com.
Pretty Funny by Rebecca Elliott (Penguin Books Ltd, £7.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
