A boy watches as a father and son are sucked into the quicksand of Millom's seawater estuary: "At the sweet age of nine, I saw my coastline commit double murder." In Gareth Thompson's gripping second novel Sunshine to the Sunless (Definitions, £5.99), Andrew, haunted by guilt and the memory of that horrific day, cannot turn to his parents, who are absorbed in their own problems, nor to the local gang that looks "for anything to stick their boots into".

Only his frail grandfather brings him solace and teaches him the art of cross-breeding daffodils, which brings beauty to the rundown town.

Nine years later, his life changes: his dad gets cancer and he falls for the unattainable Angie, beautiful and a poet. In love and in fear for his dad, he tries to handle these two emotions.

When the BBC celebrates the anniversary of Wordsworth's poem The Daffodils, Angie turns to him for help and enables him to overcome the pain of the past. A touching rites-of-passage story.

"What is the most beautiful thing in the world?" This question lies at the heart of Sonya Hartnett's poetic novel The Ghost's Child (Walker £9.99). Maddy's father takes her on a magical voyage to find the answer. It is only when she finds a quiet, questioning young boy waiting for her one day that she learns that "worth, and promise, and courage" comes from within.

On the beach, she finds a young man holding a pelican. She calls him Feather and with him her world - "which had for so long been as teeming as Aladdin's cave" - becomes empty but for him. together they live in a fairytale cottage in a dark wood, but when her "tiny elf" is stillborn she opens "the prison of her heart to let him go". Later, alone, she sails across the wondrous seas to finds Feather again and finally accepts his longing for solitude. Shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize, Hartnett's haunting myth, with its dreamlike, simple drawings by Jon McNaught, will delight all ages.

Kate Thompson, winner of the Whitbread children's book award, is a unique writer who has a "common thread to my storieseach involving an individual journey". Creatures of the Night (Bodley Head, £10.99) combines the hard-hitting realism of Dublin with the magic of the fairy folk of rural Ireland.

Teenager Bobby finds himself immured in a damp, rent-free country cottage when his feckless Ma moves him and his stepbrother Dennis to County Clare, hoping to get him away from his city mates with their drugs, joy-riding and violence.

Things get worse when four-year old Dennis becomes obsessed with a tiny woman who slips through the dog flap to enjoy a tiny green bowl of milk he leaves for her. Bobby steals an old Skoda belonging to the previous tenant, who has disappeared.

When his mates no longer welcome him, he finds unexpected support from a local farming family. Strong and hard-hitting, with a horrific ending. Thompson's novels go at a cracking pace.