The Kissing Game by Aidan Chambers

This collection is a timely addition to today’s teenage fiction. The 16 stories vary from 50 pages to less than 1,000 words — the latter Chambers designates flash fiction: “a flash of light, a spark, which allows one a quick view of a whole scene or a person or event”. These suit our sound-bite culture, attuned to the small screen, mobile phones and iPods, with their brief up-to-the-minute messages.

The stories all centre on “betrayal and revenge” and come in a variety of forms. Cindy’s Day Out, the longest piece, is told from Cindy’s point of view. Like her namesake Cinderella, she is treated by her two sisters as “the family runabout”. But today she’s had enough; she’ll not answer to Cindy, but to Ursula, her real name. Dressed in her sister’s clothes she has a makeover, is picked up by a brazen chap with a fancy car and then inveigles herself into a meeting with a favourite author — that, too, is a letdown. Finally along comes Paul, an aspiring young artist for whom she will pose naked.

In The God Debate, two schoolboys have a Becket-like conversation about the reality of God.

Up For It, a flash fiction play, has two supermarket shelf-fillers arguing how far one of them has gone with “Her from panini”. Expulsion, takes the form of a letter sent from a pupil to “Mr Pearson, Sir” to justify his absence from compulsory sports by citing sex as an ideal substitute.

Toska, a thoughtful monologue, ponders the meanings of this Russian word: “spiritual anguish”, “a dull ache of the soul”, “a vague restlessness”; any one of these could convey the tone of this collection.

Chambers has received many awards; Postcards from No Man’s Land won the Carnegie Medal. In the 1980s, he ran courses on children’s literature at Westminster College and still has an association with Oxford Brookes University.

In this collection he explores the “anguish, longing, pining, yearning, restlessness” of teenage years with sensitivity, holding to the belief that stories should be “complete and not a mere anecdote. . . dense and full of possible meanings”.