A Small Madness (Allen & Unwin, $16.99 pb, 240 pp, 9781760110789), Dianne Touchell’s second novel, opens at the end of summer holidays when teenagers Rose and Michael have sex for the first time. What starts out like a summer romance soon turns darkly gothic.

A Small Madness by Dianne Touchell

She let him put his sticky hands in places her own had never been. All those places she’d been warned about. The places that attract strangers with lost puppies and the wrong touch and sin. Private places that embarrassed her and shocked her eyes wide when he touched them.

Rose and Michael are white, middle-class children, neither rich nor poor, academically ambitious and seemingly set on some kind of life after high school. Their nameless suburb is largely without history, save for the memory of a murder. Decades before, a young woman was killed, her body buried in the nearby bush, her killer never found. While Touchell is not yet a writer of the same power as Sonya Hartnett, they share a view of the suburbs as the natural home of alienation and violence.

This is a tightly focused, even claustrophobic novel. School, parents, and a church both families attend are the constants in Rose and Michael’s lives. Ironically the church, and the family link it creates, provides the cover for Rose and Michael’s sexual relationship. Rose also has a friend, Liv, who is targeted, ‘slut shamed’ to use the current term, for her devil-may-care attitude to sex.

When the inevitable pregnancy is confirmed, Rose confides in Liv, but at this point the story takes a dark turn. Frozen by ignorance, fear, or guilt, Rose goes into total denial about the pregnancy. She views her growing foetus as ‘the virus’ and punishes her body in the bitter hope that something may force her hand. Michael provides little real help, his anguished passivity underwritten by an older brother’s callous, misogynistic advice.

The reader keeps waiting for Rose to come to her senses – or for an adult to do something – but A Small Madness is not that kind of novel. Rose and Michael live in a community where home, school and church never seem to offer real solace or support. In particular, the narrowing influence of the church hovers over their actions – or inactions – and condemns them to cruel and lonely choices. The dramatic climax of the story is violent, visceral, and desperate.

Ultimately, the bond between Rose and Michael endures: it is for the reader to decide whether this is something to celebrate. Discussion about their future will invite deep reflection on all that has gone before. A Small Madness is a tightly wrapped moral puzzle that asks: are the communities we are making really fit places for young people to grow up in?

For the Forest of a Bird by Sue Saliba

Sue Saliba is one of our most interesting voices writing for young people. Her short, lyrical novels often focus on an isolated family where silences and ellipses are filled with an intense longing. Her families are not so much dysfunctional as deeply wounded. Saliba’s language is always considered, and easily marries naturalness with lyricism. So it is in For the Forest of a Bird (Penguin, $17.99 pb, 208 pp, 9780143571780), her third novel for Penguin.

Fifteen-year-old Nella lives in North Fitzroy with her mother and older brother. This is no hipster paradise. The mother lives trapped in mental illness, scarcely able to leave her bedroom; her brother is angry and remote. The cornerstone of the novel is Nella’s yearning for her father. At the book’s opening, she is making plans to share with him the discovery of a colony of swallows. Every year in the second week of spring the birds return to the nearby creek. ‘What was it that it made her feel? It was something … something like belief, like everything in every other part of the world, of her world, would be all right if she could just witness the swallows.’

But her father’s return is disrupted, and the reunion takes place south of Melbourne at Phillip Island. Here, Nella meets Isobel, a few years older and even more absorbed by the world of animals and the earth. Nella first encounters Isobel at dusk, carrying a wounded animal. (Interestingly, Nella’s feeling for nature attaches to the small things, not the great causes.) At Phillip Island, Nella is confronted by the changes her father has made and by her own diminished role in his life. The reconciliation with her father is intimately tied to the lives of others around her, in particular to Isobel, who is learning to overcome grief through helping to regenerate wild places on the island.

The title of the book comes from Judith Wright’s poem ‘Birds’. The poem expresses a deep human desire for oneness with the natural world. Nella’s desire to negotiate her broken, complicated family, makes For the Forest of a Bird a memorable and moving novel.