French has taken the familiar boat-people story and sent it spinning in an original, fantastical direction. The children on the beach come from different ethnic backgrounds and from different times in history. Each leaves the beach at night separately and returns the next morning. ‘The place you go back to each night is your Australia. The one you dreamed of,’ one of the children explains. They will grow stronger and braver until each feels ready to step through a driftwood portal at the end of the beach and return to his or her real world. Faris thinks he will never want to take that step. But one day he does.

In an intriguing narrative, French covers the long history of immigration by sea to this country, beginning with the dark-skinned Mudurrah, with the aim, one assumes, of engendering empathy for present arrivals. She writes without sentiment, but with the ability to touch your heart. In the copious notes at the end of the book she gives short biographies of the children on the beach and relates what happened to them in later life, in Australia. These are so convincing (‘gained her PhD in 2003, became a consultant for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade ...’) I was surprised to learn in the acknowledgments that they are all totally fictional. Young readers, who rarely bother with acknowledgments, will stay unenlightened.

Not quite the truth, but with enough facts to make the tale seem plausible, is Stephen Dando-Collins’s Caesar the War Dog: Operation Blue Dragon (Random House, $16.95 pb, 284 pp, 9780857980533). This is the second book to feature the remarkable and much-decorated Australian Army Explosive Detection Dog (EDD), his handler Sergeant Ben Fulton of Special Operations Engineer Regiment (SOER), and his mate Charlie Grover, VC, of SAS. There are many acronyms in this story: just wait until the secretary-general of the UN and his party is captured by the Taliban and the CH-47, DSRV-801X, and the EITS are deployed. It adds credibility to a tale that is founded on fact – there is a real-life equivalent of Caesar serving with the Australian Army – but soars into thrilling boys’ own adventure territory, as an international strike force is assembled to rescue the hostages in Afghanistan. Naturally, the inclusion of Caesar guarantees the success of this mission impossible, and authorial insights enlighten readers about how he might be feeling: ‘With his tail wagging, Caesar looked up at Ben with an expression that seemed to say, Ready for action when you are, boss. Let’s go!’ Dando-Collins is a respected military historian, and his book is meticulously researched and plotted. The extensive author notes and Fact File at the end separate truth from fiction.

If it poses certain narrative challenges to have a dog at the centre of your story, how much bigger are those challenges when the dog is made of fibreglass? Stay, by Jesse Blackadder, (ABC Books, $14.99 pb, 210 pp, 9780733331770) is based on the true story of a Royal Guide Dog fibreglass Labrador that in 1991 was ‘dognapped’ from outside a Hobart supermarket by a merry band of Antarctic expeditioners and taken south on the Aurora Australis. Shortly afterwards, the last remaining husky team was retired from duty, while the ersatz dog, named Stay, remained to gather a cult following; hence the novel’s subtitle, The Last Dog in Antarctica. On this foundation of fact, Blackadder, who went to Antarctica on an arts fellowship in 2011, has spun an entertaining and informative story in which Stay is chained up, liberated, broken, repaired, befriended, betrayed and, weed on by a jealous husky, all the time making us fully aware of what she is thinking, feeling, and observing. ‘[The huskies] “don’t like you much, do they?” Windy said. “I guess they can’t figure out if you’re real.” I am real, Stay thought indignantly.’

Very real is the plight of children orphaned by the continuing conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Rosanne Hawke’s Shahana: Through My Eyes (Allen & Unwin, $15.99 pb, 206 pp, 9781743312469) is the first in a new series edited by Lyn White, which will explore the dangerous and terrifying worlds of children living in contemporary war zones. Hawke has the unenviable task of trying to explain to young readers the complexities of the longest-running conflict in the world today, and what life is like for those who, as with fourteen-year-old Shahana and her young brother, struggle for survival along the Line of Conflict that divides Kashmir in two. Shahana’s needlework keeps them alive, but when she finds a boy lying unconscious near the border she runs a terrible risk by sheltering him. A young militant called Amaan takes an unusual interest in the little household, then Tanveer is kidnapped and made to work weaving carpets, and Shahana, whose feelings for Amaan have taken an unexpected turn, steels herself to undergo a forced marriage in order to free him. There is much going on in this novel, but none of it is graphic, sexual, or violent, despite the circumstances. Hawke has a sentimental streak that colours and influences all her novels about young people in similar straits (the Borderland Trilogy, 2003; Marrying Ameera, 2010; Mountain Wolf, 2012), and readers can be sure that, in the end, love and hope will prevail and the good will be rewarded. Nonetheless, Hawke has done her homework and the details of Shahana’s world ring true.

The same cannot be said for Kerry Greenwood’s Evan’s Gallipoli (Allen & Unwin, $15.99 pb, 211 pp, 9781743311356), which purports to be the diary of fourteen-year-old Evan Warrender as he accompanies his father, an outback hawker of herbs and spices, to the Dardanelles in 1915. It is 12 May, and in less than a week they have been given uniforms and are sailing with the Army Medical Corps. If you think this scenario implausible – the Army Medical Corps was highly organised and structured and didn’t just take on untrained pacifist do-gooders, much less one with a young son – they reach Anzac Cove twenty days after leaving Melbourne, the fastest transit in the history of World War I. In the trenches, on 17 June, young Evan first meets the soon-to-be-famous Simpson, with his donkey Murph, and a week later the two are chatting like old friends. Remarkable, since Simpson was killed by sniper fire on 19 May. I lost faith in Greenwood’s story after that and was only mildly outraged when, after a long and confusing trek behind enemy lines – the book badly needs a map – Evan and his father reach Athens in October, in time to greet transport ships bearing the wounded from Gallipoli – which, of course, never happened. Australian wounded were taken to Lemnos, then to Alexandria and on to Cairo, or to Malta and Britain – never to Athens.

How could a writer of Greenwood’s stature have written a book so full of basic errors about the most documented subject in Australian military history? Even novels shouldn’t distort history, and Gallipoli is sacred ground. The secret about Evan revealed in the final pages only makes the whole adventure even more unbelievable.