THE SOLACE OF THE ROAD Siobhan Dowd (David Fickling, £10.99)

In 2007 Siobhan Dowd was buried at St Margaret’s Church, Binsey, at the age of 47. She left four amazing novels that resonate with humour and humanity.

Before writing for teenagers, she worked for PEN in the United States and then Britain, promoting writers in prison. In Oxford she became deputy commissioner for children’s rights.

With this background it was inevitable her stories would be informed by children lost and deprived in some way, and a trust in her name has been set up to promote literature for disadvantaged young people.

Born in London to Irish parents, she spent much time in County Waterford; two of her novels concern the Troubles in the 1980s and are imbued with a love of Ireland.

Her first novel, A Swift Pure Cry, won the Branford Boase Award and the Eilis Dillon Award and she was listed for the Carnegie Medal. It features a 15-year-old girl, Shell, helped by her younger brother and sister to deliver her baby, who dies minutes after it is born. Shell is condemned by the church and the community, and the book is a harrowing tale of poverty, illegitimacy and alcoholism.

In the compelling The London Eye Mystery, Ted, an adolescent with Asperger’s, takes his visiting cousin on an outing, then apparently disappears from the pod without trace.

Her third published novel, Bog Child, weaves a complex, tender story. Sixteen-year-old Fergus uncovers a small body hidden in the peat. Blackmailed, anxious for his brother on hungry strike and his growing love for Cora, an archaeologist, his life gets increasingly complicated as politics and personal life juggle one with the another.

The last book to be published is Dowd’s The Solace of the Road (David Fickling, £10.99). Holly tells her own story as she sets off on the long journey from London to Ireland to find her mam.

Now 14, she has been a care-baby in Templeton House longer than anyone else, but when Miko, her kind social worker, moves on, she finally agrees to be fostered.

She hates her new “posh and phoney” family, then finds a flowing, glittering blond wig and is utterly changed.

No longer “plain old Holly Hogan, the girl nobody wants” she becomes “Solace of the road, walking into the night sky, thumb out and fag in hand” all the way to find her mam with her slinky body-suit.

Jumping on to the coach she sets off on the long rambling A40 to Wales, then gets lifts with “the good and bad, the ones who cared and most that didn’t”.

Fallible, funny and frightened, clutching her mam’s amber ring, she dreams of her sky house “where the clouds bumped against the window”.

Dowd, an inspirational writer with rare humanity, has left behind a fine legacy.