HAVING HAD huge fun judging this year's Booktrust Teenage Prize, I'm convinced that most of the talent has migrated to the 11+ market. Kicking off with Eoin Colfer's inventive Airman (Puffin, £10.99/offer £9.89), in which a boy unjustly imprisoned for regicide learns how to survive and escape an island prison with a fortune in diamonds, this has been a golden year.

Emily Diamand, winner of the inaugural Times/Chicken House Children's Fiction Competition has a thrilling adventure set in a half-drowned England where Lilly and her Cat must save the Prime Minister's daughter from the piratical Reavers. Reavers' Ransom (Chicken House, £15/£14.40) is also available in a special numbered and signed hardback edition from Books First (£15/£14.40) or Waterstone's. If the adventures of Lilly and Cat are too wild then Eva Ibbotson's The Dragonfly Pool (Macmillan, £10.99/ £9.89) has an evacuated heroine and her progressive school save a Prince from assassination in an enchanting novel from the good witch of kidlit.

Series such as Michelle Paver's superb Chronicles of Ancient Darkness have kept up the highest standard of writing, tension and developing characters for 11+ readers. In Oath Breaker (Orion, £12.99/ £9.99), Torak, Renn and their beloved Wolf are up against the last of the evil Soul-Eaters in a darkening series that combines meticulous research into Stone Age life with first-rate storytelling.

Cornelia Funke's Inkheart trilogy, the first book of which is now a film starring Helen Mirren, came to a finale in Inkdeath (Chicken House, £12.99/£11.69) as Mo's family gain their freedom from the tyranny of stories. Never has the Viper of Milan been so gorgeously reimagined - though Teresa Breslin's The Nostradamus Prophecy (Doubleday, £12.99/ £11.69), set in Renaissance France, comes close. Celia Rees's highwaywoman heroine Sovay (Bloomsbury, £10.99/£9.89) proved that she could pull off another hit like Witch Child. Tanya Landman's Apache and The Goldsmith's Daughter (both Walker, £6.99/£6.64) are beautifully written tales of revenge among the Apaches and the Aztecs respectively.

For boys, Charlie Higson completed his five-volume Young Bond series with the triumphant By Royal Command (Puffin, £12.99/£11.69), while Anthony Horowitz had his own teenaged spy Alex Rider at his most impressive in Snakehead (Walker, £12.99/£11.69), battling people trafficking and worse in the Far East. Joseph Delaney's Wardstone Chronicles about an exorcist and his apprentice continue to provide top-notch chills in The Spook's Mistake (The Bodley Head, £9.99/£9.49).

Graphic novels continue to go from strength to strength, and Classical Comics' versions of A Christmas Carol and Frankenstein (both £9.99/ £9.49) are especially fun, though my guess is that teens will prefer the Gothic horrors of Mary Shelley to the seasonal joys Dickens's ghost story.

Horror is eternally popular with the 13+ reader, though not every parent is going to feel that the latest Darren Shan or Anthony Horowitz is suitable for Christmas. However, Shan's Wolf Island (HarperCollins £12.99/£11.69) in which Grubs Grady battles Shadow on an island of werewolves; and Horowitz's Necropolis (Walker, £12.99/ £11.69) - introducing his first heroine, kidnapped to a ghoul-infested Hong Kong - will have kids ignoring the TV to read. So, too, will Marcus Sedgwick's The Kiss of Death (Orion, £6.99/£6.64) his spine-tingling sequel to My Swordhand is Singing, in which vampires invade Venice. My choice is The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury £14.99/£13.49), Neil Gaiman's collection of interlinked stories, modelled on The Jungle Book, about a toddler who escapes the murderer of his entire family and is brought up by ghosts and vampires.

My Book of the Year for 14+ is Neil Shusterman's Unwind (Simon & Schuster, £6.99/£6.64), set in a future in which teenagers who annoy their parents are put down for “unwinding”, ie, total body parts donation - a topical subject, thrillingly dramatised - and three rebels go on the run together. Grumpy, paranoid teens will have their worst fears confirmed.

Kate Thompson's gripping and funny Creature of the Night (The Bodley Head, £10.99/£9.89) has a delinquent hero exiled from Dublin to a country cottage where his little brother finds a sinister little “friend” who may be the murderer of its previous tenant. David Almond also allows for the possibility of the supernatural in his unsettling Jackdaw Summer (Hodder, £10.99/£9.89), in which two boys find an abandoned baby in a deserted house.

For 15+ readers, Mal Peet's Exposure (Walker, £7.99/£7.59) is stunningly good, blending Othello with Brazilian football, celebrity culture and the lives of slum children in a mix of brilliance and compassion. Siobhan Dowd's Bog Child (David Fickling, £10.99/£9.89) is a time-slip tale linking a boy's struggle to escape the Troubles in Northern Ireland through education with Bronze Age human sacrifice.

Violence has been a consistent theme in this year's teen fiction, and the two strongest books for this age are Anthony McGowan's The Knife That Killed Me (Definitions, £5.99/£5.69), a harrowing story about how a boy gets half-bullied, half-seduced into carrying a knife. The simplicity of the language makes it accessible to 12+. The other, which won the Booktrust Prize, is Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (Walker, £12.99/£11.69), in which Todd, the last innocent boy in a frontier town, discovers why there are no women - and what being able to hear the “Noise” of everyone's thoughts does. The first in a trilogy, it's original, powerful and steeped in literary richness as well as excitement.