Pam Macintyre

My picks are Shaun Tan’s stunning, ‘silent’, 128-page picture book/graphic novel The Arrival (Lothian) – a book for our times in its challenging content and format. It places the reader/viewer inside the immigrant experience, with all its regrets and possibilities. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Red Shoe (Allen & Unwin) melds the Petrov Affair, a fairy tale and the effects of postwar dislocation on a family into a wry moving and shocking story told by a naïve yet knowing child, in spare and evocative language. Meg Rosoff’s Just in Case (Penguin) is as edgy and daring as her first book, How I Live Now (Penguin). Justin’s existential dilemma is deeply felt and profoundly affecting, yet the book is playful and very funny. Intelligent, insightful and constantly surprising, this is one for the thinkers.

Stephanie Owen Reeder

Great books can take readers on different journeys. Mem Fox and Terry Denton’s A Particular Cow (Viking) is an entertaining romp for the very young. It records – in a few pertinent words, hilarious details and vibrant colours – the anything but normal morning walk of an accident-prone cow. In contrast, Colin Thomson’s Norman and Brenda (Lothian) charts the ordinary trek through life of two anti-heroes. There is pathos, black humour and poignancy in this tale for older readers, as it shows how unremarkable lives can intersect to produce something special. Shaun Tan’s spectacular visual essay The Arrival is a picture book cum graphic novel whose appeal lies with a broad audience. Tan imaginatively and sympathetically documents the plight of refugees as they make the hardest of all journeys. This tour de force of book production and visual communication is an entrancing, emotive and ultimately life-affirming ride. Take it!

Anna Ryan-Punch

Highly original and with an unforgettable opening scene, Meg Rosoff’s Just In Case had me miss my train stop more than once. Her meditation on how we are to live in the face of uncontrollable twists of fate has a ring of truth that transcends both the age of its characters and intended audience. With enviable sustained inventiveness, Margo Lanagan’s Red Spikes (Allen & Unwin) demonstrates how the short story can encompass so much with so small an embrace. Her deep sense of the classical, and artful blending of the surreal with the everyday lends a mythical quality to these unsettling stories. My final favourite for 2006 is Shaun Tan’s wordless graphic novel The Arrival. This elaborate reflection on belonging and isolation speaks volumes without words, but with images so careful and rich with meaning, it demands repeated readings.

Mike Shuttleworth

Adults like to play hide and seek with the truth around teenagers. Three outstanding books of 2006 reveal inconvenient and sometimes painful realities. Julia Lawrinson’s Bye, Beautiful (Penguin), set in the West Australian wheat belt in 1966, tells of the secret lives of two teenage sisters. It is a stark and beautiful reminder of the many forms of oppression – patriarchal, racial and economic – that lie in wait to shape a life. Ignore Ursula Dubosarsky and you miss one of the most original writers of our time: The Red Shoe weaves fable, fiction and fact to portray a family and plays upon the climate of fear that defined the Cold War era. Tim Flannery’s Young Adult adaptation We Are the Weathermakers (Text) leaves the reader in no doubt about the causes of global warming, the serious implications, and the need for urgent action. No secrets here. Pushing the boundaries in exciting ways are Notes from the Teenage Underground, by Simmone Howell, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (Knopf), by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn.

Ruth Starke

All my chosen titles deliver a big emotional punch, none more than Kestrel (Lothian). You would have to be a hard-hearted cynic not to be moved and delighted by this stunning picture book. Mark Svendsen’s poetical text about a boy longing for a boat and not realising that the one he is helping his grandfather to build will be his are complemented by photorealistic illustrations, begun by Steven Woolman and seamlessly completed after his death by Laura Peterson. Sofie Laguna’s wonderful little Bird and Sugar Boy (Penguin) might well become a classic; I was swept away by this sad, lovely tale of a problem boy and the passion for birds which sustains him. Laguna’s finely controlled prose manages to be both lyrical and totally appropriate to the young narrator – a difficult thing to bring off. And, finally, there’s the conclusion to Lian Hearn’s gripping historical saga ‘Tales of the Otori’. Much was expected and Hearn delivers magnificently. The Harsh Cry of the Heron (Hachette Livre) is moving, dramatic, surprising and utterly satisfying – in many ways, the best of the four volumes. Oh, Takeo!