A choice of first novels

American Youth by Phil LaMarche (Sceptre, £12.99, pp. 221) is a sparsely written, penetrating tale of a boy who finds himself in a moral dilemma when he abets the accidental killing of a neighbour. Fourteen-year-old Ted LeClare tries to impress the Dennison brothers by showing them his father’s rifle, but when he leaves the room briefly the brothers squabble over the loaded gun and the elder one accidentally shoots the younger. Ted’s mother coerces him into denying that he loaded the gun, leaving him in a legal and ethical quandary. When he starts high school, moreover, he finds that he has become the poster-boy for a sinister, right-wing group of students calling themselves American Youth. At first Ted basks in the warmth of their attentions, but he is soon repelled by their menace and hypocrisy, finding himself forced to choose between them and the rumblings of his young conscience.

LaMarche is an insightful, technically gifted writer. He makes Ted’s predicament compelling, setting up fascinating conflicts with a minimum of fuss or affectation, and his dialogue is spot on. Most impressive, though, is the novel’s memorable sense of place: Ted’s bleak, recession-hit town, with its half-completed housing projects and ubiquitous ‘For Sale’ signs, reigns disquietingly over the entire narrative.

The young heroes of Richard Milward’s charming Apples (Faber, £9.99, pp. 200) also live in a threatening environment: a Middlesbrough council estate. Eve, a pneu- matic blonde and the coolest girl in school, gets ‘mortalled’ on drink and drugs most nights and feels guilty about having fun in tacky clubs whilst her mother, dying of lung cancer, sits at home; Adam is a barely noticeable virgin with few friends and a violent father who throws a fit when he catches his son in the attic with an open copy of Razzle.