Like all the best gambling films or stories, this novel is peculiarly engrossing from the moment when Denn is first dealt in, to his final apotheosis as a professional gambler with no life outside the table.. She also meets a boy she likes, but does not dare inform him of her situation.This is a wise book, telling it how it is. All teenagers could read it with profit, as they could Pete Hautman’s cheeky Feeling Lucky (Bloomsbury, pounds 4.99) The profit here has nothing to do with self-discovery. It relates to all the money American teenager Denn finds he can make from playing poker with suckers who have not developed his particular skills.Denn begins to lose his soul as he gradually opts out of everything except the game. She then discovers she has done much better than expected in her GCSE exams, fuelling a now unobtainable desire to go on studying. This is a fine novel, intelligent, scholarly and altogether something different.Mary Hooper’s (Megan)2 (Bloomsbury, pounds 4.99) continues the timely story of a 15-year-old girl who decides to keep the baby she has unwittingly conceived.

Annice becomes caught up in an imaginary world prompted by two paintings seen at an art gallery. Gradually, unreality takes over, but so compellingly that readers too start believing in the fantasies Annice weaves as a way of escaping from herself and others An unlikely but romantic ending sees everything straight. There are terrible hardships and witnessed cruelties en route, but Roberto’s single-minded determination to return to his home in Venice, and his extraordinary adventures, make for a moving, passionate and totally involving story. This is another must-read novel, well able to stand comparison with that classic wartime escape story, Anne Holm’s I Am David.Margaret Shaw’s Walking the Maze (Oxford, pounds 5.99) is an unusual, bookish novel, actually warning against the way that a love of stories can sometimes distort life. But nothing else is as predictable in this weird, mesmerising story, part realistic tale, part fable, told in deadpan prose of a quiet authority.

Once started, this story demands to be finished.Donna Jo Napoli’s Stones in Water (Oxford, pounds 5.99) describes the journey, based on a true story, of an Italian adolescent named Roberto who escapes from a Nazi work camp in Eastern Europe. She is searching for the buried treasure which Stanley eventually finds. Sent to a macabre, almost surreal, boys’ juvenile detention centre in the middle of a Texas desert, young Stanley, who happens to be innocent, has to contend with a fiendish woman warden supported by two thuggish underlings. Life would not be worth living were the other young inmates equally brutalised, but in this case they are not – a welcome ray of light in an otherwise bleak moral landscape.The warden, who paints her nails with rattlesnake venom, requires each young offender to dig a five-foot hole every day, regardless of thirst and a baking sun. His dying grandfather provides him with the key for his successful survival. Written with an acute sense of place plus a touch of the supernatural, this is a sombre but always readable story. After just two books, Almond has become a leading children’s writer.Louis Sacher’s Holes (Bloomsbury, pounds 10.99) has already taken America by storm, and it’s easy to see why.

The past continues to influence the present, with the descendants of the old miners continuing bitter feuds about what actually happened so many years ago.Kit finds himself stranded between these factions. This would be a strange choice of present for any normally cheerful young person this Christmas.David Almond’s first novel Skellig won almost every prize going. His next story, Kit’s Wilderness (Hodder, pounds 4.99), is also extremely good. Kit Watson arrives at Stoneygate, an old mining area with long memories of a dreadful industrial accident.