Paperback: Revenant, by Tristan Hughes

Memorably set among the treacherous rocky shores and forlorn seaside villages of Ynys Mon, this novel braids the voices of three misfit friends into an elegy for their tarnished childhoods. From contrasting angles each remembers Del, the gawky and dauntless girl who led their outsiders' gang until the fateful adventure they have returned to remember. Moods and words, not plot, propel the book (with just a touch of Dylan Thomas-does-the-Famous Five). But Hughes's

rapt and rhythmic prose captures all the secretive intensity of an "entire compacted country": not just this island of saints and sinners off the north Welsh coast, but youth itself.