This summer the mysterious Zoe enters his life and he advertises in the Sunday Mail for a father. Along comes the rough diamond with the heart of gold, Dev Eagle, whose existence Joel keeps secret with Dev’s complicity. Under Dev’s caring handling, supported by Mei’s friendship, and precipitated by some (melo)dramatic episodes in the plot, Joel gradually sheds the chip on his shoulder, and life takes turns for the better. Hawke writes well and convincingly through Joel’s eyes and communicates the pleasure of fishing even to this reader who always feels sorry for the fish (even though happy to eat them). However those skills deserved a more plausible plot. It is not the subject matter that is unlikely – after all, Patricia McLaughlin’s story of a mail order mother Sarah, Plain and Tall, is a classic of children’s literature – but how it is conveyed.

Wolf on the Fold by Judith Clarke

Silverfish, $14.95, 172 pp

Judith Clarke’s Wolf on the Fold (Silverfish, $14.95, 172 pp) links the lives of family members in six vignettes from 1935 to 2002: in 1935 after his father’s death, fourteen-year-old Kenny leaves school to find work to support the family of younger siblings, and en route has a disturbing experience; in 1957 Aunty May, suffering from senile dementia, comes to stay with the now adult Kenny and his daughters Frances and Clightie, and provides comfort for Frances who is later able to do the same for her confused great aunt; Frances also features in the next story set in the fifties which centres on Vonny Cooney who, in grade three can’t read and is made to suffer horribly at school.

When Frances and her friend Jeannie have an encounter with Vonny three years later, they are able to compensate for their lack of understanding. In 1975 in an Australian school Raj and Kanti, neighbours of Kenny and Dolly, encounter racism that precipitates their family’s confronting the horrors of the past. In 1991 Frances is living in Jerusalem as the Gulf War threatens, and she and her son Gabriel, in the Arab market, experience the kindness that links ordinary people despite what divide governments might make. In the future of 2002, Clightie’s ten-year-old grandson, James, is disturbed by the deterioration of his parents’ marriage and is determined to protect his younger brother, Davie, from the reality of what the shouting means and the loss of childhood pleasures. Bringing the stories full circle, Clarke has James being given optimism and courage by fourteen-year-old Kenny riding by on his father’s black bike.

Judith Clarke is one of our best writers, and Wolf on the Fold exhibits the characteristics of her fine writing: emotion without sentimentality, humour lurking in the darkest moments, profound insight, capturing of small yet significant moments that change lives, the recognition of shared experience which dissolves the divide of age, gender, race and class, and the possibility of the metaphysical. To be read and re-read.

Closed, Stranger by Kate De Goldi

Penguin, $14.95, 180 pp

Nineteen-year-old Max and charismatic, larrikin Westie in Kate De Goldi’s Closed, Stranger (Penguin, $14.95, 180 pp), have been friends since primary school. In this novel Max relates a watershed year in their relationship. Westie is adopted, and during this year his longing for his birth mother is realised in their meeting and contact over several weeks, until the intense relationship is severed by her. Running parallel is Max’s first falling in love – with Meredith ‘tiny, angular, bird-like’ not at all the ‘babe’ of his and Westie’s fantasies, but the most interesting girl he has met. The slow revelation of themselves to each other prompts faded memories even in this far-from teenage reader.

This is one of the pleasures of De Goldi’s writing, the sense of recognition accompanied by the pleasure of surprise. Max lives with his mother who is unhappy and angry about her husband’s betrayal and rejection of her, and his brother Leon who is reacting badly to the break up Max thinks he has Westie all worked out, knows him better than he knows himself. Their relationship revolves around getting drunk, getting stoned, running competitions, playful, winy banter, but underneath it is a perhaps deliberate misreading of Westie by Max, an acceptance of him at face value, because he has to believe in Westie’s ‘who cares’ catchcry to survive his own sensitivity to what he sees as his life, the disaster.

De Goldi writes forcefully, lyrically and with subtle wit. Her characters are complex, interesting, sometimes elusive, and change and develop in convincing ways throughout the duration of the narrative: Max’s Mum, who is initially alienating, eventually, painfully, moves on; Max and Leon make friends with their father and his new family; Max understands that Westie is with him forever. This book is no object lesson, but a probing exploration of friendships, betrayal, loss, transgression, the past existing in the present, the whole complex catastrophe of having friends, lovers, family, and the individual’s capacity to heal itself. Torrid events – death, suicide, incest are handled with delicacy and understatement, and while in summary the novel might sound overloaded with incident (then so would Hamlet), the experience of reading it is of encountering lucid sagacity.

Present and irritating, missing and longed for, appearing supernaturally, adults are at the heart of these adolescent journeys.