CRYSTAL MASK. By Katherine Roberts. The Chicken House pound;11.99. TES Direct pound;10.99.

THE GREAT PYRAMID ROBBERY. By Katherine Roberts. Collins Voyager pound;4.99. TES Direct pound;3.99.

THE ROPEMAKER. By Peter Dickinson. Macmillan Children’s Books. pound;12.99. TES Direct pound;10.99.

Rueful stories, related by fiction editors pressing the claims of a new manuscript, tell of publishers’ board meetings brought to an abrupt halt by the marketing director: “Yes, but is it the new Harry Potter?” Publishers cling tightly to young Harry’s coat-tails. The Chicken House quotes an eight-year-old appraiser of an earlier Katherine Roberts title. “It’s just like Harry Potter, only better!” The august OUP, promoting Stephen Elboz’s latest, asks “Is there life after Harry Potter?” and announces that the press has “teamed up with Galt toys to provide you with your very own magic kit.”

A Land Without Magic does indeed begin at a boarding school for magicians with a quirky headmaster, an eccentric staff and curriculum, pet rats, flying letters and a young male hero (and friends) full of HP energy. Although Elboz’s Eton Magical Academy is palely sub-Hogwarts, his novel finds its own impressive voice when young Kit Stixby sets off on the royal airship (he’s Prince Henry’s best mate) to Callalabasa, where a dastardly villain (equally dastardly in the first novel of the series) has devised a world-threatening machine. Now the pace becomes breakneck, the invention wild, the comedy sparky. Kit’s world echoes ours, but is more fun. Paris, for example, is full of airship docking towers designed by M Eiffel and crazy drivers of aerial blimps.

Katherine Roberts’s Crystal Mask is set in the Otherlands of High Fantasy. This is the sequel to the award-winning Song Quest, the first in the Echorium sequence, and isn’t much like HP at all, despite the publisher’s puffs. The school on the Isle of Echoes has more in common with Ursula Le Guin’s rigorous school on Roke in the Earthsea quartet. Here, the Singers preserve arts which keep the rest of their world in check, occasionally making sorties to restore order on the Mainland, populated by vanishing centaurs, villains of genuine malice (yet also some pathos) and wizards whose magic brings heavy responsibilities. Her adventurers are the uncertain young Singer, Renn, and Shaiala, a girl raised among centaurs with kicking feet as lethal as their hooves. Their uneasy relationship, complicated when the young Horselord Erihan joins the plot, provides much of the dynamic of a novel marked by rapidly paced adventure, fierce and costly fights, startling revelations and cataclysmic set pieces.

Katherine Roberts has also begun a project vast in scope yet admirably simple in conception. The Great Pyramid Robbery is the first of seven novels, each involving one of the wonders of the ancient world. This time, it’s the building of the Pyramids; next the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and so on.

Here, young Senu, the son of a skilled craftsman but weak in his school studies, is humiliatingly assigned to work on a labouring gang. Nothing is what it seems in this tale of plot and counter-plot, however, and Senu and his friend Reonet (a girl as forthright as Senu is diffident) are caught up in a desperate intrigue.

This is perhaps not so much fantasy as a story set in a culture where the spiritual world and its mystical influences are embedded in everyday life. Much of the lively pleasure the able reader will find in this novel stems from the ka, the “material soul”, which children can see and talk with readily, while adults can meet their kas only in dreams. Readers who delighted in Philip Pullman’s daemons will no doubt here enjoy the impish yet anxious Red, Senu’s ka. They will leave the book, incidentally, much the wiser about the Pyramids and the Sphinx.

A couple of tetchy quibbles: the modern idiom of the children’s speech might work against the sense of other times carefully constructed through a special vocabulary; and might not an editorial eye have picked out the extraordinary number of times characters “giggle”?

These novels all feature uncertain young characters discovering a stronger sense of self. Peter Dickinson’s The Ropemaker shares this element - and the quest structure - with them but its 423 pages move at a more measured pace, allowing this world to seem far wider, lending the issues at stake a greater weight. A girl and a boy, each with one of their grandparents - skilled, wise, yet grumpy and aware of their failing bodies - set out to find the only wizard who can save their valley, trapped between raiding horsemen on one border and a savagely taxing emperor on the other.

Dickinson’s almost medieval land is kept in balance only through the preservation of old knowledge, yet he avoids both barren conservatism and vapid sentimentality. As always with this fine writer, the narrative has moments of great visual power and excitement. The travellers hurtle by raft through perilous waters, or soar on the back of a roc. Violent treachery is never far away. Their paths lead to dangerous and terrifying cities. Underlying everything, there is a sense of the cyclical nature of time; all this has happened before, and a final chapter reminds us that it must happen again. The exercise of magical power is at a cost and so the newfound maturity of the young characters is all the more secure.

Here the classic elements of fantasy are at work. We may be in another world, but the tensions that drive the novel (within and between the characters) touch our own experience. Far from escaping into fantasy, readers may see themselves with greater clarity. Peter Dickinson has already won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award twice, when the award juries gather again, this book will surely be on their shortlists.

Geoff Fox