The most recent book by Linda Newbery, The Sandfather (Orion £6.99), features 13-year old Hal, who has a fight with his best friend and is excluded from school for a week.

Sent to a seaside town while his mum is in hospital, to stay with an elderly aunt he barely knows, his anger recedes. In this new environment, he continues to look for his missing father, a father he has never known and who dominates his dreams and all his thoughts.

He knows only that “half of him is missing. The black half. His father’s half.” He also has a bag of marbles from his father — the “actual evidence that his father had ever existed – apart from his own body, his own self”.

Away from home, he makes new friends: his mother’s old boyfriend Wesley Prince, and Don, a painter who captures the changing moods of the sea. On the beach, he builds a mutable sand sculpture that will be washed away by the tide.

Newbery, a former English teacher at Wheatley Park, who won the Costa Children’s Book Award in 2006, is an original and intriguing writer.

The Sandfather is a heart-rending and candid search for identity by a young boy struggling to come to terms with his dual heritage.

David Calcutt’s second novel Shadow Bringer (Oxford £9.99) is a menacing psychological thriller.

Nathan does want to stay with his aunt and his aggressive cousin while his mother is away for a short break. But why does she want to go and why has his father left them?

Taking the dog over the fields, something is watching him, something dark and nameless, a Creature that moves and twists on itself as hovers over the grey muddy fields and swims beneath in the still dark pool of the Lime Pits.

At home, the Bogeyman shuffles and scratches in the attic of his aunt’s house.

Threatened by his hostile cousin, overwhelmed by dread on all sides, with no one to turn to he finally faces up to the horror of his situation, his father’s absence, his blackouts and the buzzing in this head that converge in horror.

Reminiscent of David Almond’s Skelling, Calcutt’s coming-of-age tale combines realism and the supernatural in a tense and haunting tale.