THIS IS A GOLDEN AGE of children's fiction, and there was strong competition for this year's Booktrust Teenage Prize. The judges - the novelist Julia Bell, the children's book specialist John McLay, Emma Sherriff, a librarian, Matthew Sawyer, the teenage judge, and I - had argued long and passionately for the 12 books on our longlist, then again for the six books on our shortlist. We were joined in the final debate for the winner by this year's teenage winners of the Booktrust creative writing competition: Aniketa Khushu, Gabrielle Brooks, Zoe Miles and Thomas Harris.

If, like me, you have been slightly suspicious of the “young adult” market, then be assured that it now displays the boldness and creativity that kicked off a decade ago with Rowling and Pullman. There is Kate Thompson's hilarious and creepy Creature of the Night, about an Irish delinquent whose little brother discovers a new “friend” in their home, whose previous inhabitant had been murdered. Snakehead by Anthony Horowitz has his teenaged spy Alex Rider finding out about people-trafficking in the Far East. Sally Gardner's The Red Necklace transported us into the enthralling world of Yann the gypsy and crippled Sido, at the start of the French Revolution. Anthony McGowan's The Knife that Killed Me is a dramatic and topical account of how a teenager gets bullied into carrying a knife, with tra-gic consequences. Apache by Tanya Landman's is a tale of a Native American girl's revenge on the men who murdered her little brother. All of these convinced us with their portraits of teenagers grappling with a violent world and its codes of honour, loyalty, ambition or revenge.

Lastly, there was Ness's novel, The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first part of a tril-ogy and 496 pages long. It reads like a cross between Russell Hoban, Tristram Shandy and Ursula Le Guin. However, its originality, creative courage and story made it the one that our panel responded to most strongly. “It's the one I looked forward to reading each night,” a teenage judge said.

Ness (above) is an American who lives in England, after a peripatetic childhood that included a spell living in Hawaii at the same time as Barack Obama. Perhaps it's this exposure to the exotic that makes his creation of a world in which men and boys can hear the “Noise” of each other's, and animals' thoughts - but not those of women and girls - so convincingly weird. His concept fuels a plot involving murder and an epic chase, but it also explores themes of guilt and responsibility, and the difference between the sexes. His hero, Todd, is the last innocent boy left in the all-male town of Prentisstown; when he and his dog Manchee discover a hole in the Noise they also discover a girl called Viola, and are soon running for their lives.

“I like books about small towns and isolated communities,” he says. A tall, thoughtful man of 37, Ness is the second son of a US Army drill sergeant - “who wouldn't allow us to play with toy guns at home” - and was clearly the odd one out in his Christian family. After reading literature at the University of Southern California, he followed his partner here nine years ago, always knowing that he wanted to write fiction. His first novel, for adults, and a book of short stories were fun-ded by a year's redundancy money, but The Knife of Never Letting Go was written while he was teaching creative writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

“I spent about a year and a half letting it stew, and thinking about Todd's voice. I knew it would all be from Todd's point of view, but not that it was a children's book.” Todd's discoveries push readers to their limits: in one scene he kills a Spackle, one of the planet's original, humanoid inhabitants, and his dog encounters their psychopathic pursuer, Aaron, with horrifying results.

The novel is full of high drama, and yet it's the emotional journey that is most fascinating. Todd has to learn how to talk to Viola without being able to hear her thoughts, and when he finally does understand her it is very affecting. The title of the trilogy, Chaos Walking, refers to the unmediated confusion of thoughts and desires that Todd has grown up hearing, brilliantly rendered for us on the page; but there are touches of humour, too (his dog is obsessed with poo; birds with sex, and so on). After ending The Knife of Never Letting Go on a cliff-hanger, he has completed the second, The Ask and the Answer, and is halfway through the last novel.

“I don't do a whole bunch of planning about plot, but I do know I have to get to certain powerful scenes from the beginning,” he says. “I did wonder about the toughness of some of them, but the books I hated most as a teenager myself were trying to teach me a lesson - like the bully and the victim becoming friends. I think that if you tell teenagers the truth, they trust you. I have huge respect for how articulate and thoughtful teenagers are.” It's a respect that is entirely reciprocal.

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The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
Walker, £7.99 Buy the book

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