Tamzin Pook is ‘a girl you wouldn’t look at twice’, but she is also a dab hand at slaying Revenants, zombie-style creatures she’s forced to fight in front of huge audiences in Margate. This isn’t, though, the Margate we know and love. Like the other places in Philip Reeve’s Thunder City (Scholastic 384pp £8.99), it exists in a future version of Earth, where it moves across the surface on traction wheels. Returning to the world of Mortal Engines (2001), Reeve has a blast here. He leavens a thrilling narrative with humour: a porcupine revenant is the Fretful Porpentine; a hotel manager resembles ‘an apologetic pencil’. This peaceful world, where the cities largely cooperate, is gorgeously and carefully realised (one of the chief goddesses is called Peripateia). 

When the trading town of Thorbury is subjected to an attack by the architect Gabriel Strega, an individualist who cares not for tradition and might have stepped out of an Ayn Rand novel, the indomitable governess Miss Torpenhow must embark on some daring escapades, including rescuing Tamzin from captivity. Strega is an adherent of ‘municipal Darwinism’, the notion that larger cities will inevitably prey and feast upon smaller ones. 

In many ways, Thunder City is an elegiac book: a sense of sadness abounds when Strega strips the fine buildings of Thorbury to make way for gleaming mechanical monstrosities. But it is primarily a skilfully written adventure story, bursting with last-minute reversals and clever details (intelligent octopuses are deployed as scouts). Tamzin’s complex motivations render her a sympathetic protagonist, and among the motley insurgents are many memorable characters, not least Torpenhow, who can teach history and fire a gun. The question of how cities (and by extension the world) should be governed is a potent theme: can humanity stand strong against a predatory figure like Strega? This book will prove a treat for lovers of the sequence and for readers, aged ten and up, new to it. 

In Catherine Fisher’s Starspill (Firefly 256pp £7.99), the titular town is swathed in fog. It is a terrifying, cold phenomenon, and has a personality of its own. The world has been fog-bound since the Wolf ate the sun. The populace lead frightened, obscure lives, the fog symbolising the erasure of hope and knowledge. The residents pick over remnants of fallen stars, polishing them up and turning them into lamps – sad, tiny reminders of what they lack. 

One day, a talking cat invades orphan Zac’s bedroom and gives him a vital task: he must locate three Embers to bring the sun back and stop Wolf worshippers from keeping everyone in the dark. A mysteriously long-living bookseller, Aurelian (his name pointing towards a new dawn), turns up with a map of the world as it was before the fog descended. He has access to a secret method of travelling, which allows Zac to zip around on his quest. Magic and danger are rife, Zac’s courage is winning, and the talking cats provide delightfully sardonic interjections (all they want is to bask in sunlight). Written in clear, poetic prose, this fantasy of reason and love overcoming ignorance and guile will delight readers of ten and up. 

Also obscured by fog is the bizarre school in Eibhlís Carcione’s Black Gables (Everything with Words 229pp £8.99), a beautifully unconventional, Gothic-tinged tale about Rosella, a girl whose mother has lost her memory and who, on moving to a new place, must deal with some seriously weird goings-on. The fog is a metaphor for both memory loss and the systematic suppression of knowledge by Rosella’s horrible teachers. Carcione revels in creepiness: Ms Nightshade travels with a car full of porcelain dolls, and the novel brims with haunted paintings, magical lakes, ghouls and spooky carnival music. Dark secrets must be uncovered before light can be restored. This story will suit readers of eleven and up who enjoy a good scare. 

Piers Torday’s Midnight Treasure (Quercus 384pp £14.99) also has Gothic touches. Torday is a fan of John Masefield, and the influence of The Midnight Folk can be detected not just in the book’s title but also in its supernatural apparatus and its characters’ quest for treasure. ‘Vampirs’ rule the world here, exerting an iron grip on mortals, though there is a ban on ‘turning’ them, since they’d soon run out of humans.

Young Tibor, a werewolf, is sent on a quest to find the Midnight Treasure. He is accompanied by a strange talking sculpture called the Sleeping Knight, which only gives help when he tells it the truth. A soul-eating demon is on Tibor’s trail, and, since vampirs can disguise themselves as anything, enemies might lurk closer to home than he realises. Fast-paced and full of lovely touches, such as a giant talking bison and ‘thunder trains’ powered by, well, thunder, Midnight Treasure will give readers of ten and up heaps to enjoy. 

In Hilary McKay’s elegant, fable-like Rosa by Starlight (Macmillan 240pp £12.99), we meet the archetypal awful aunt and uncle of children’s fiction. The aunt and uncle here step in to ‘look after’ Rosa when her parents die. A pampered magical cat, Balthazar, provides Rosa with comfort (someone should write a thesis on the role of cats in children’s fiction). The aunt and uncle produce artificial lawns, which they even sell to Buckingham Palace and Venice, a fine symbol of the thoughtless destruction of so many of the world’s most beautiful places. 

Lonely and imaginative, Rosa loves reading but her aunt throws her book of fairy tales in the bin, a neat allusion to the forces of commercialism and ignorance ranged against child readers today (a recent survey revealed that only around a third of children read for pleasure – a statistic made doubly depressing by the fact that so many excellent books are available to them). McKay’s Venice is a place of both terror and enchantment, and the account of Rosa’s search for love and family among the canals is lyrical and heartfelt. Dreamy readers of ten and up will be swept away by its fierce hopefulness. 

Meg Rosoff’s Almost Nothing Happened (Bloomsbury 230pp £12.99) is about a madcap race across Paris in search of a stolen oboe, which, I believe, is a first in young adult fiction. Callum is seventeen and has had a terrible time on a recent French exchange, falling for Elodie, who did not reciprocate his affections. On a whim, he decides to miss the train home to London. He fetches up on the doorstep of his cousin Harrison, a musician. The plot unfolds over one night, and involves the oboe, a Matisse painting, a climate change demonstration and an older girl on a motorbike. Rosoff’s prose is involving, funny and wry, and Paris is evoked beautifully – not just the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, but everything else too, from the haute bourgeois apartment which contains the painting to the banlieue where the thief lurks. There’s also a deliciously apt commentary on the difficulties of being a freelancer. Rosoff’s novel is a fine coming-of-age story. It might even tug those teens away from their phones.