Marcus Sedgwick’s many novels for the young are innovative, intelligent, wide-ranging in subject matter and tinged with a poetic sensibility unusual in the field. He died suddenly last year, leaving behind a great hole in the world of children’s books. I met him two decades ago, in my very first job after university, working as a factotum at the Folkestone Literary Festival. Puppyish and overconfident though I was, he nevertheless took me seriously and became a kind and generous mentor. It is poignantly appropriate that Ravencave (Barrington Stoke 120pp £7.99), published posthumously, sees a writer’s family returning to the Yorkshire Dales to confront their grief.

James is a teenage boy, ill at ease; Mum, a writer, can see ghosts, but her creative well has run dry; and Dad is increasingly obsessed with his family’s history and the mill workers from whom he descends. Their quest takes them to Crackpot Hall, which means not what you think but ‘Cave of the Ravens’. James must descend into the cave in order to find out the truth about himself and the tragedies of the past. In a few pages, Sedgwick touches on the march of commerce and time, the long-lasting effects of the Industrial Revolution and the therapeutic functions of ghosts, memory and song. The landscape is gorgeously rendered and the prose as eerie, luminous and clear as ever. Here teenagers will find hope, warmth and reconciliation.

There are ghosts everywhere in Grave’s Pass, the setting for poet Eibhlís Carcione’s startlingly good debut novel, Welcome to Dead Town Raven McKay (Everything with Words 288pp £8.99). Raven, engaging and clever, is a foster child whose parents have literally vanished into thin air. She’s packed off to stay with a distant relative in a town where the living have an uneasy relationship with those who are, shall we say, not really alive at all. Her bizarre new classmates include a boy with gills and a werewolf called Luperca. Carcione conjures up a sinister atmosphere, whether Raven is shopping for new clothes or entering the darker parts of town in order to find out what happened to her parents. She encounters terrifying goblins, the friendly ghost of a sea captain and sundry supernatural beings. The only thing she has from her parents is a suitcase containing a black butterfly, but can it, symbolically combining darkness and light as it does, help her break the tyrannical rule of the ghostly mayor and his wife, whose glance alone can kill? Readers aged eleven and up will be enchanted.

Gil, the hero of Tania Unsworth’s latest book, Nowhere Island (Zephyr 240pp £14.99), is also a foster child, his parents having drowned in a kayaking accident when he was five. Fed up with being shunted about, he escapes from his social worker’s car at a petrol station and runs away. He finds refuge on a motorway island, screened by trees, unnoticed by those who speed past. The island is also inhabited by two brothers fleeing an abusive father and by Pez, a resourceful girl in flight from a dangerous cult, the Starborn. Together they build a camp, and Unsworth chronicles their growing tenderness towards each other with involving and touching details. To survive, they breed crickets and steal food from cars that pause in the layby. Pez makes friends with a condor who can’t fly, a symbol of the children’s own predicament. But this strange idyll, a patch of wilderness away from the horrors of steel and tarmac, can’t last, and the four are at the mercy of both the weather and human intrusions. Unsworth’s book is tense and vivid, her band of misfits proving that the weak can win out and that wherever you go can be a paradise if you want it to be.

Carnegie Medal-winning author Katya Balen’s novella Nightjar (Barrington Stoke 78pp £7.99) deals with a family broken up by divorce. Noah’s father lives in a swanky apartment in New York with a new girlfriend; he hardly bothers talking to his son, firing off curt emails every now and then. On a surprise return, he takes Noah for a walk in a clumsy attempt to understand him; but when Noah (who loves birds, and is approaching his bar mitzvah) wants to rescue an injured nightjar, the two end up in an argument. Should Noah bring it home or should, as his father argues, he let nature take its course? Balen’s short book is remarkably affecting, as father and son gradually learn more about each other and recognise ‘that funny strange space where people and things and actions can be wrong and right at the very same time’. It’s a mature and sensitive message. Balen’s compassionate, beautifully written work will suit those aged eleven and up.

While there is no shortage of novels for children set in the Second World War, the decades of its aftermath tend to be neglected, so it’s a delight to encounter Judith Eagle’s The Stolen Songbird (Faber & Faber 336pp £7.99), which is set in London in 1959. Young Caro lives in a pub beneath the railway arches at Waterloo and is allowed to roam freely. Her mother, Jacinta, a famous whistler, went missing while on tour and so Caro has been packed off to stay with a fearsome great-aunt, whose mores situate her very much in the Victorian age. But there are whispers of the future: Caro’s friend, Horace, wants to be a fashion designer like Yves Saint Laurent and boys with greasy quiffs and leather jackets menace the streets. Caro chafes at her new confinement. When she finds a stolen painting of a songbird in her mother’s suitcase, she and her chums are thrown into a thrilling escapade that is old-fashioned in form but modern in sensibility and will charm and delight readers of ten and up.

Also concerned with heists is J J Arcanjo’s debut, Crookhaven: The School for Thieves (Hodder Children’s Books 336pp £7.99), which sees a young pickpocket, Gabriel Avery, sent to a prestigious school for crooks. These thieves, however, use their talents to right wrongs, returning stolen paintings and puncturing corporate greed. Despite his name, Gabriel is no angel, but more akin to the light-fingered hero of Leon Garfield’s classic pickpocket novel Smith, whose essentially decent nature leads him to happiness. References to Oliver Twist and Robin Hood abound as well. Gabriel is a Merit, selected because of his abilities; he has to contend with Legacies, the children of famous thieves (including Penelope Crook herself, daughter of the headmaster), and make alliances in order to have a chance of winning the Crooked Cup. Meanwhile, the children take lessons in deception, lock-breaking and other mysteries of the criminal world. This debut puts a lovely new spin on the classic school story, offering a strong sense of community and togetherness in the face of adversity. It will tickle and thrill young miscreants of ten and up.