ACHUKAREVIEWS...

The first of two volumes, its full title is The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor To The Nation - Volume 1: The Pox Party. I already tell everyone I meet to read this author's fantastic satirical novel, Feed, and now I shall be telling them to read this.
I dare say young readers - especially those unfamiliar with Feed and Anderson's other novels - may struggle to get into it, fearful that the formal eighteenth century diction and grammar of Octavian's narrative might never develop into a compelling story. But they will soon be fascinated by the narrator's realtionship with his young teenage mother and by all the goings-on at the College of Lucidity, where Octavian is treated to a trial education of letters and manners.

Eventually both the boy and the mother fall victim to another trial involving smallpox. Dr Trefusis observes at one point during this harrowing section of the book, "When I peer into the reaches of the most distant futurity, I fear that even in some unseen epock when there are colonies even upon the moon itself, there shall still be gatherings like this, where the young, blinded by privilege, shall dance and giggle and compare their poxy legions." It is just that 'most distant futurity' which Andersen describes (in a far different prose) in Feed.

Octavian's own narrative comes to an abrupt halt three quarters of the way through the novel, at a moment of great heartbreak, and it is a tribute to Andersen's skill and confidence as a stylist that the miscellany of documents and correspondence that fills most of the remaining part of this first volume holds the reader riveted until Octavian's return.

I haven't mentioned yet that Octavian is a black child born to an African mother; that the book is about slavery and the events leading up to the War of Independence. Those are the themes. And Andersen's book will remain a classic treatment of slavery and the birth of the American nation for a very long time to come.

It did seem (I'm of the same generation as Almond) that there were a greater number of deranged, demented and scarifying individuals at large in the community in the late 1950s and early 1960s. More than one character in this book would, in a contemporary novel, have been counselled or (more likely) drugged into comparative quietude. This, coupled with the freedom that children had to wander around from dawn till dusk without parental paranoia (it really was like that then) makes it the perfect period to write about.

Almond's fiction is special because it has a religious or spiritual layer. The main characters in this book are altar boys who, with typical adolescent mundanity, view their duties (at weddings and funerals) in the same regard as waiters serving at table, with an eye on the best tip. The damaged character is one who has been rejected by the Roman Catholic seminary, and yet, moulding figures out of clay, seems to have the divine power of investing the inanimate with life.

Like all great books, Clay contains tragedy, hope and a sense of right (or down-to-earth goodness) being wronged. It's a reminder, if reminder is needed, that David Almond is the very best author at work in the field of YA fiction in the UK.

This is the first title on ACHUKAREVIEWS to be awarded five GOLD achukachiks.

Most guides of this type have to be produced on a shoestring of a budget and often appear in dowdy pamphlet format. This one has been designed and produced to an extremely high standard (it has benefitted from Arts Council sponsorship), with cover and inside illustrations by Pablo Bernasconi. An essential resource for anyone seriously interested in giving children the widest access to all that's best in children's books from around the world. More than being a handy signpost to what's available today, this bright user-friendly production ought to serve as an incentive for publishers to produce an increasing number of books in translation in the future.

But it's Christian Birmingham's illustrations that really drive this retelling of the King and the pageboy's charitable visit to a peasant's home. The only other illustrator I can imagine coming near to Birmingham's rich evocation of that peasant-King gathering is P J Lynch. In the following pageturn, revealing such a contrasting scene - a cold aerial view of the snow-smothered cottage and surrounding forest, we see an illustrator at work who really knows how to drive a narrative forward pictorially.

The best new Christmas title of 2005.

Mal Peet's first novel, Keeper, was a miracle. A novel that finally revealed to me - a cricket lover - the poetry and magic in the game of soccer. Second novels are often disappointments, and when the author himself told me (at a summer party) that he was working on a novel set in Holland during the war, I confess I felt disappointment was on the cards.

How wrong. This is an outstanding novel. Outstanding in every regard. It establishes Peet as a novelist of immense gift and versatility, for no two novels could be more different than Keeper and Tamar and yet be so equally brilliant.

The two principal characters in Tamar are undercover operators working in Nazi-occupied Holland in support of the resistance. There is many an episode of nailbiting excitement in the book, but for much of the time the undercover agents have to cope with the boredom of waiting and watching, and with the interpersonal tension of loving the same woman.

Parallel to this is a more contemporary narrative, set in 1995, which is properly subservient to the war story, and yet utterly convincing.

Throughout the book the writing is of the highest order, crisply figurative description falling from Peet's pen with apparent ease: "the mud had solidified into frost-capped peaks and ripples that looked like mountain ranges seen from the cockpit of an aircraft" or "the sky was the colour on old knife" to give just two examples.

Published by Walker Books as a Young Adult novel, Tamar is a novel worthy of standing with the very best of contemporary British fiction.

The book uses pentominoes (a set of 12 tessellating shapes each comprising five squares) as a model for the way apparently unconnected events can be made to interlock and lead to the solution of a mystery. The central relationship between Petra and Calder is somewhat serious and geeky but works well and the moody black-and-white fullpage illustrations by Brett Helquist make a huge contribution to the novel's atmosphere.