David Buckley follows the emotional and physical journeys traced in three novels. In Beverley Naidoo’s No Turning Back the police are so determined to preserve the spirit of apartheid that they dress in plain clothes to round up the black street children in the middle of the night and tip them into a lake. The children scramble out quickly, expecting the officers to return in uniform to arrest them for trespassing. Ten years after her Journey to Jo’burg, and in a South Africa trembling on the brink of democratic elections in 1994, Naidoo shows that young black South Africans do not need an oppressive constitution to confirm their victimhood.

Sipho, Naidoo’s young hero, leaves home - a shack in a shanty-town - and the mother he cares for to escape a brutal, drunken stepfather. Joining a gang of children who hustle for money around the supermarkets during the day and huddle together on waste ground at night to keep warm, he savours a kind of freedom and comradeship despite the knifemen in the park and the threat of the police. When he is taken in by Mr Danny, a well-meaning white shopkeeper who gives him a bed in his home in return for working in the shop, he at first merely regrets the loss of his new-found independence, but bitterness follows when he comes to see how Mr Danny’s charity confirms his subjugated status: Sipho will still be working in the shop when Mr Danny’s son has gone to college and he will never fully be a member of the family.

This is a realistic and moving story, episodic in structure rather than tightly plotted. Naidoo’s tentatively upbeat resolution of the problems in Sipho’s personal life mirrors the tentative steps towards a new society in South Africa.

The banner of Jean Little’s His Banner Over Me is a banner of love, and although the children in the Gould family are wrapped in it as well, one feels as sorry for little Gorrie - based on Little’s own mother - as for Sipho. Gorrie and her five siblings are destined to spend years apart from their parents, who are missionaries in Taiwan. The father’s calling dictates the family fate with occasional tearful rebukes from Gorrie’s mum, who longs to return home.

Although people rooted to the spot by mortgages rather than God may expect to feel little sympathy for Gorrie’s parents, Jean Little makes the family’s unusual problems over a period of 15 years feel like genuinely unavoidable dilemmas. Her tendency to accentuate the positive is sometimes cloying, but this is a bold chronicle of a worthwhile emotional journey.

Feng Jicai’s Let One Hundred Flowers Bloom is spoiled by Chris Smith’s translation, unless the original Chinese was tattooed with ideograms as cliched as “in a nutshell”, and “I decided to pull out all the stops”.

Jicai’s hero, Hua Xiagu, a young Chinese artist sent to work in a porcelain factory in the 1960s, extracts the stops to make his wedding day go perfectly. Unfortunately, Mao Tse Tung is also pulling out all the stops to get the Cultural Revolution off to a good start, and Hua Xiagu quickly falls victim to the Red Guards. He is publicly humiliated as an alleged counter-revolutionary, beaten up, and sentenced to 700 days hard labour.

This is a harrowing and deeply moving story. Hua’s devotion to art as a symbol of beauty and freedom contrasts with the ugliness of oppression. The dog which befriends him seems superior to Hua’s human tormentors and, in the end, demands more loyalty. But the clear line of the book’s tragic development only just manages to transcend the simple but leaden prose which is only touched with grace once: “It had been raining and the scenery looked as though it had just been scooped out of the water”. If it were not for that, the narrator’s talk of his “thrilled . . . artistic sensibilities” would seem like adolescent posturing.