“The comments come flooding in. // Now they say they saw me soaring, / they say I drank blood, / they say I danced bare and wild, / calling forth the devil at night.” Old superstitions about witchcraft meet modern-day Delhi in Roar (Penguin, £8.99), the latest striking verse novel from the award-winning Manjeet Mann, whose previous work has deftly explored abusive families and the plight of refugees.
Here we are introduced to Riza – a comparatively privileged girl whose life falls apart after an ill-advised affair with her best friend’s boyfriend. Blamed entirely for the scandal, Riza is demonised in rituals that owe as much to contemporary social media culture as they do to older patriarchal horrors, with a particularly devastating outcome.
Full of rage and fear, she joins an all-woman team of vigilantes, inspired by the real-world Gulabi Gang, distinguished by their pink saris and quest for justice. The charismatic leader, Shalini, is a warrior training “an army of women and girls”, determined to seek vengeance against “those who thought they could take / whatever they wanted, when they wanted.” She is “Kali reborn, / goddess of destruction and rebirth, / feared and adored, with a tiger by her side, / a sword in her hand, cutting through the lies, / and slaying her enemies.” Razi hopes Shalini will seek justice for her, too, but class and more particularly caste come into play here – does this rich girl really need the help of those who have come from rural deprivation and abuse?
There are no easy answers in this thought-provoking story. Without downplaying the appalling treatment of women, and lack of options available for redress, it is all too aware of how tricky it can be to decide what, if anything, counts as legitimate violence, or how to balance the tension between the authenticity of a grass-roots organisation and the media-wrangling necessary to gain positions of power. Touches of magical realism, with Razi experiencing flashbacks to her ancestors’ encounters with witch hunts, allow the novel to feel like a parable about rage, injustice, and the ways in which one can use one’s voice.
The Kate Clanchy affair: Was the ‘posh do-gooder’ ever really cancelled?
November YA titles: surviving real and mystical horrors
Megan Nolan: ‘How can you think it’s so terrifying in the US and not feel that way about the UK?’
‘Parasocial’ relationships are very 2025 apparently. They’re also perfectly normal
Debut writer Miranda Moore is here to break hearts with A Beautiful, Terrible Thing (David Fickling, £8.99), which opens with Nathan, just turned 18, driving his mum’s car on the last day of school. It’s meant to be a new beginning, full of possibilities, but then something unthinkable happens. “I’d only looked away for two seconds, three max,” Nathan thinks as he realises that his “future had been ripped from me by some sick magician”. He hit a 13-year-old boy crossing the road. Dead on impact. The charge is “causing death by dangerous driving”.
With the trial several months away, his mother tries to get him out of the house – to work a bit, to keep busy, to do anything other than dwell on the misery he’s inflicted on strangers. When he meets Cara, it creates “a little oasis of normality” for both of them, but the reader is already aware it can’t last: Cara is the dead boy’s older sister.
It takes great skill to make this slightly-implausible premise believable, and Moore does. These feel like genuine aching teenagers caught up in a nightmare situation, rather than chess pieces manoeuvred for dramatic impact; there is a real attraction between the two as well as a mature recognition of the trauma both are enduring. This gut-punch of a novel is one to discuss with bookish pals.
Although lighter in tone, Bethany Rutter’s Ask Me Anything (Hot Key, £8.99) touches on some difficult subject matter, with protagonist Mary-Elizabeth in her second year of university and trying to navigate the complexities of sexual relationships in a world that is still infinitely more dangerous for women than for men. She wants “to be peppy and blase and not burdened by big feelings”, the sort of cool girl who can just fool around with playboy Felix and not get hurt. But as their situationship progresses, we know it can’t end well. Even in the early days, she has “the slight feeling with Felix that any minor inconvenience will make him disappear.”
To make matters worse, she’s the agony aunt for the campus magazine – someone who should know better. “I didn’t know I could be someone who people mess with and who gets messed around. A tragic, pink-haired clown girl. Pathetic.” Rutter, who is always attentive to body positivity and representation of larger figures, resists making Mary-Elizabeth’s size the main point of the story; it’s simply one of several elements in a frustratingly-always-topical tale.
Despite some minor quibbles regarding subplots – there’s a cheating stepfather who vanishes far too quickly, for example – this is a satisfying read for older teens, with a satisfyingly uplifting ending.
“There is old magick in this wood. It brought me here. it brought a lost spirit to me. And now to another witch. Each of us out of our time.” Dark things lurk in the woods, as every fairy tale reminds us. In Finbar Hawkins’s third novel, Ghost (Zephyr, £14.99), the nature of the beast is not quite clear but we do know that three very different girls are being called towards one another. One is a mute slave from Roman times, one an eighteenth-century white witch doling out herbal remedies, and one a contemporary art-school dropout.
Drawing on Celtic myth, this lyrical novel invites us into a world where ghost tales are real. Heavier on atmosphere than worldbuilding, it will appeal to readers who like their horror leaning towards fable over fantasy. While I would have loved more insights into the individual characters, I can’t deny that it’s a compelling read.
“I was eighteen, a cold cup of tea, unwanted. I had an arsenal of weapons. I was the bringer of madness.” We return to the world of the wealthy Sinclairs once more in E Lockhart’s We Fell Apart (Hot Key, £8.99), the third novel set in the world of We Were Liars (now a TV series). Readers can expect the same mix of summer intrigue and intertextuality from Lockhart, who consistently draws on her background in English Literature (she holds a doctorate from Columbia) to weave cultural allusions into her pacy tales. Tragic Shakespearean kings find their way into each of the Liars titles; here we also have an exploration of video games as art form, echoing Lockhart’s pleasing blend of superhero comics and Kafka in Fly On The Wall.
For Matilda, the chance to meet the famous artist father she never knew is like unlocking “a secret level you never even imagined was in a game”. Gaming is a way into classic myths and a way to think about mysteries and patterns while still being critical of the form: “you can’t be a gamer if you get mad about misogyny. It’s threaded through practically every game ... when I become a game designer, I’ll make some superviolent games that don’t also hate women. Or forget we exist.”
Alongside the quest to uncover the truth about her father, Matilda encounters a boy – of course – who is “a bunch of complicated hostilities and opinions sutured together with copper wires”. Smart and swoony; I adored this.
