Storm by Suzanne Fisher Staples, a tale of how life and authority cast shadows over the friendship between a black girl and a white boy in a close-knit Chesapeake Bay community, was among last year’s most highly praised novels for young teenagers. Its appearance among the New Windmills means a schools’ hardback edition is now available for only pound;2 more than the Red Fox paperback.

Storm and Beverley Naidoo’s No Turning Back are the most exciting new entries on the list. Other New Windmills to watch out for include Get Real!, a non-fiction prose collection starring Bill Bryson, and three titles by Michael Morpurgo - When the Whales Came, Arthur High King of Britain and Robin of Sherwood. The pound;5.99 doesn’t buy the full set of illustrations by Michael Foreman that came with the original editions of the Arthur and Robin tales. In Robin of Sherwood especially, this is a considerable loss: Foreman’s portrayal of the Outlaws adds new meaning to the term “social exclusion”. For pound;8.99 you can buy the Hodder paperback and get twice the book, possibly convincing a few 12-year-olds that they don’t have to give up picture books just yet.

The pick of Collins Cascades’ new list includes contemporary adult autobiography - My Left Foot by Christy Brown - and Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud’s semi-fictional treatment of her childhood in Morocco, now the subject of a Gillies MacKinnon film starring Kate Winslet.

In Freud’s book, two sisters are swept along in the wake of their mother’s romantic and spiritual adventures. Max, the young hero of Malaika Rose Stanley’s novel Man Hunt (another Collins Cascade selection), has the opposite problem - his mother doesn’t want the boyfriend that Max needs in his life. A great title for football-mad 10 to 13-year-olds.

Geraldine Brennan