AT SOME POINT IN THE long march to adulthood, every child feels like a misfit. Peculiar parents, weird looks, ill-health, ethnic origin or just possession of an imagination make for torments that sufferers believe uniquely theirs. But if misfits can only find the right books, they might perceive the above as strengths, not weaknesses to be concealed at all cost.

Two authors I haven’t previously liked have novels worth recommending on this subject. Cliff McNish wrote The Doomspell Trilogy and the Silver Sequence, which generated gigawatts of supernatural suspense but never found a satisfying storyline. But Angel, his eighth book, follows the acclaimed Breathe and shows how practice makes perfect.

Two girls are linked by their belief in angels. Freya can’t stop yearning for the glorious one she saw as an eight-year-old, a visitation that tipped her into hospital treatment, from which she has just emerged at the age of 14. She is accepted by a nasty trio of mean girls at her school, where her brother Luke tries to protect a boy from bullies.

To Freya’s horror, she not only sees another angel – as hideous as her former visitor was beautiful – but must choose between her new gang and Stephanie the misfit.

There is a Stephanie in every school: a child whose uniform is all wrong, whose parents are New Age nutters, and who believes what idealists tell her about courage, truth and the holiness of the heart’s affections. Poor Stephanie has never seen an angel but prays to them and makes the enormous error of telling her classmates about it on her first day, in an excruciatingly funny scene. Freya tries to warn her, but also makes a mistake – telling Stephanie that she has seen an angel. Both are in danger of losing their sanity, but the twist is that Freya is a hybrid human-angel.

Woven into the sacrifices involved in true friendship is an interesting debate about the nature of sanity. Although it shares concepts with David Almond’s Skellig and a novel in the XxxHolic manga series, Wings, McNish’s outstanding prose is married to a suspenseful plot and a quiet humour that will appeal to 13+. Hallelujah!

Siobhan Dowd’s grim tale of a teenage pregnancy in Ireland, A Swift Pure Cry,won numerous prizes last year, but I much prefer The London Eye Mystery, not least for its tender comic ebullience.

Again, there are echoes of a another novel – Mark Had-don’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Once again, we have a boy narrator with Asperger’s syndrome solving a mystery, this time the disappearance of his teenage cousin Salim from a sealed pod on the London Eye.

Obsessed with the weather, Ted teams up with his sister Kat to solve a mystery that has police baffled and saves Salim’s life. Ted is also intrigued by the oddity of words (pointing out that “eavesdropping” is strange because the only thing that drops from eaves is rain).

As in Fiona Dunbar’s enchanting Toonhead, Dowd transforms disability into a gift, and Ted’s family, with their robust charm, are especially well realised. There are so many misfits in fiction that normal seems odd.

Angel

Orion, £9.99; 304pp

Offer £9.49 (free p&p)

The London Eye Mystery

David Fickling, £8.99; 334pp

Offer £8.54 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 Buy the book here

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