Painting Ruby Tuesday. Jane Yardley

It is the summer of 1965. Annie Cradock, the only child of exacting parents who run the village school, is an imaginative girl with a head full of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Annie whiles away the school holiday with her friends: Ollie the rag-and-bone man (and more importantly his dog); the beautiful piano-playing Mrs Clitheroe who turns Beethoven into boogie-woogie (and like Annie sees music in colour); and Annie's best friend Babette - streetwise, loyal, and Annie's one solid link with common sense. But everything changes when the village is rocked by a series of murders and the girls know something they've no intention of telling the police. In the present day, adult Annie is a successful singing coach in a stifling marriage. Her ambitious American husband, impatient with his quirky wife, is taking a job in New York - but is she staying with him? As Annie struggles with her future, she first has to come to terms with the bizarre events of 1965.

The Memory Artists Jeffrey Moore

A renegade scientist's pathbreaking memory experiments form the core of Moore's dashing, postmodern debut novel. When young Noel Burun, the son of a disappointed chemist, is taken to see the renowned Montreal neurologist Emile Vorta, the boy is diagnosed with "synaesthesia," a condition in which all the senses intensely trigger one another. The malady, if one can call it that, gives Noel a super-Proustian gift of recollection. It proves a real boon when, years later, Noel must manage Stella, his beautiful widowed mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's. As the novel unfolds, Noel, now a University of Quebec psychology grad student, joins Vorta's neuropsych lab. There, he attempts to find a wonder drug to cure his mother, enlisting the lab's assortment of unconventional charactersto help him: the cynical roué and actor Norval X. Blaquière, hell-bent on a performance-art project that involves seducing an alphabet's worth of women, A to Z (he's on S-as in "Stella"); former film star Samira Darwish, who steps into Vorta's amnesia experiments and reinvents herself as Noel's modest muse; and jokey, chemical-happy JJ Yelle, who helps Noel concoct outrageous experiments. Canadian Moore exhibits a nimble, sprightly touch, with understated emotive depths; his rendering of Stella's sadly solipsistic diary is particularly heart-wrenching.

Mondays Are Red Nicola Morgan

Grade 8 Up-Luke, 14, wakes up from a meningitis-induced coma to discover he has contracted an unusual condition known as synesthesia in which his senses blur into one another, causing him to associate words and objects through odd juxtapositions of taste, sight, smell, touch, and sound. Even though Luke puts these new associations to good use in his poetry, he imagines himself haunted by a presence he calls "Dreeg," whose influence wavers from good to evil. Through a confused and truly bizarre chain of events, Luke, left physically weak from the coma, semi-deranged from the synesthesia, and under the influence of Dreeg, eventually embarks on a final mission to rescue his sister from a kidnapper. Although at times intriguing, the novel too often has its plot derailed by Morgan's confounding and lengthy hallucinogenic imagery, which is well conceived and sophisticated but doesn't enhance the story's pacing or characterization. The outcome is a confusing, hard-to-follow mystery that will lose most YA readers before they reach the halfway mark.

Mango-Shaped Space Wendy Mass

Grade 8 Up-Luke, 14, wakes up from a meningitis-induced coma to discover he has contracted an unusual condition known as synesthesia in which his senses blur into one another, causing him to associate words and objects through odd juxtapositions of taste, sight, smell, touch, and sound. Even though Luke puts these new associations to good use in his poetry, he imagines himself haunted by a presence he calls "Dreeg," whose influence wavers from good to evil. Through a confused and truly bizarre chain of events, Luke, left physically weak from the coma, semi-deranged from the synesthesia, and under the influence of Dreeg, eventually embarks on a final mission to rescue his sister from a kidnapper. Although at times intriguing, the novel too often has its plot derailed by Morgan's confounding and lengthy hallucinogenic imagery, which is well conceived and sophisticated but doesn't enhance the story's pacing or characterization. The outcome is a confusing, hard-to-follow mystery that will lose most YA readers before they reach the halfway mark.