The seven weeks of summer often stretch interminably for children, as well as parents. But long after the last grain of sand has been lost, some books will stay in mind as something special and remarkable - a holiday for the mind.

Next month I will be suggesting picture books, but for 6+, you can't go wrong with Josh Doder's latest Grk adventure, Grk Smells a Rat (Andersen, £4.99/offer £4.74). The little dog and his owner Tim are in India, where Tim's friend Max is taking part in a tennis championship. When our heroes discover that hundreds of children are disappearing, they uncover a plot involving a sinister blue rat.

Pure Tintinesque fun, it's matched only by Anthony McGowan's The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off (Red Fox, £4.99/£4.74), in which a quartet of boys, all hopeless at football, are inveigled by a tough girl into letting her play on their side. Besides getting the all-male world of small boys to a T, it has irresistible instructions about how to make fart-bombs. Gentler girls will adore Debi Gliori's Witch Baby and Me (Corgi, £4.99/£4.74), which dramatises sibling rivalry with eccentric wit.

The heroic Jane Nissen has reprinted Rosemary Manning's glorious seaside classic, Green Smoke (Jane Nissen Books, £6.99/£6.64), about a girl who discovers and befriends a dragon while on holiday in Cornwall, though slightly older ones of 8+ will enjoy D.A. Nelson's enchanting debut, Darkisle (Strident, £12.99/£11.69), inspired by a real Scottish stone dragon. For children of 10+, Carole Wilkinson's Dragonkeeper trilogy is a good choice. Ping has to guide the adolescent dragon Kai to find the land where other dragons survive.

Most of the best summer reads are the latest instalments of serials. From Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell's swashbuckling Barnaby Grimes: Legion of the Dead (Doubleday, 8+, £8.99/£8.54), to Death's Shadow (12+, HarperCollins £5.99/£5.69), the latest in Darren Shan's disgustingly riveting Demonata series, they are for children who adore adventure. My favourite for 8-11s come later in the holidays, with Lauren St. John's charming series set in South Africa about an orphaned girl able to communicate with animals, up against some nasty thugs in The Last Leopard and Michelle Paver's gripping penultimate new Chronicle of Ancient Darkness, Oath Breaker , in which Stone Age Torak, Renn and Wolf are in pursuit of the last but one murderous mage.

Natural magic is best in summer, but the more claustrophobic high-concept kind for 10+ flowers in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson, now on his fourth adventure in Percy Jackson and the Battle of the Labyrinth (Puffin, £9.99/£9.49), trying to prevent Kronos from invading Camp Half-Blood where the demi-gods are in training to defend the world against re-emergent Titans; Joseph Delaney's new Wardstone Chronicle, The Spook's Mistake (Bodley Head, £9.99/£9.49), which has Tom crossing witch-infested marshes to train under a new master while the Devil dogs his steps, and Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl and the Time Paradox (Puffin, £12.99/£11.69), positing that the boy genius has to go back in time and outwit his younger self.

Of all these vastly enjoyable, witty, well-written fantasy series, Helen Dunmore's Ingo quartet deserves a special mention for its superb imagining of what it would be like to transform into a mermaid or boy. The Crossing of Ingo (HarperCollins, £12.99/£11.69) is the most action-packed and satisfying of the four stories, with vivid animal portraits, a vast undersea journey and a climactic fight. Ingo will be missed, especially by young swimmers and surfers who long to share Sapphy and Conor's ability to breathe underwater.

There are some great stand-alone novels for 12+, many of them science fiction, which I will be recommending later in the summer, but one in particular stands out as special. Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (Walker, £12.99/£11.69) is about a world in which men (but not women) can hear each other's thoughts, and those of animals. The narrator is the last boy left in a sinister town founded on a secret, and when he discovers a girl hiding near by he sets off with her and his dog on an epic quest. It takes 100 pages to get going, and is 479 pages long, but is worth it.

Younger readers of 11+ should fall in love with Frank Cottrell Boyce's Cosmic (Macmillan, £9.99/£9.49), about a too-tall 12-year-old who blags his way on to a secret space mission, only to get lost. Touching and hilarious, it has a special quality of joy. So, too, does Diana Wynne Jones's House of Many Ways (HarperCollins, £12.99/£11.69), in which a miserable girl is sent to live with her great-uncle, a royal wizard.

Teenage girls with strong stomachs will fall upon Joanna Kenrick's Screwed (Faber, £6.99/£6.64), an explicit but captivating romance about a 15-year-old girl who has soulless sex with every boy she can pull - then discovers that the one boy she can't is the one worth loving. A good counterpoint to Screwed is Tanya Landman's Apache (Walker, £6.99/£6.64), a passionate and stunningly violent tale of wild justice as a girl vows vengeance on the Mexicans who murdered her little brother.

Of all the stand-alone novels published in the past six months, the two that made me sigh with pleasure are both, however, about angry, dysfunctional teenage boys. One is Anthony McGowan's The Knife That Killed Me (Definitions, £5.99/£5.69), and the other is Kate Thompson's Creature of the Night (Bodley Head, £10.99/£9.89). The first is a tragedy, so dramatic and harrowing that my reluctant reader son couldn't put it down; the other a comedy thriller. One is a vivid recreation of the nightmare of school, the other will make sulky teens marooned in their parents' idyll in the remote countryside hoot with laughter and count the days until the summer ends.

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