Big, crumbling houses have haunted our consciousness as metaphors for the nation ever since Dickens’s Bleak House, and notable writers from Mervyn Peake to Sarah Waters have created memorable piles inhabited by families on the brink of lunacy or collapse. These two new novels will give sophisticated children several hours of fun.

Sally Prue is a prize-winning author whose novels challenge perceptions of normality, faith, magic and genetics. Wheels of War (9+,OUP, £5.99, Buy this book 288pp) takes a timely look at heroism. Will, who idolises the older George, longs to go off and become a soldier but must stay behind with his mad Master and a staff of elderly retainers. The attractions of military life, with its uniform, its self-belief, its camaraderie and, later, its opportunities for rape and pillage, are experienced in bold type by one boy, while the quieter pleasures of good food and even a compost heap seem altogether less exciting. As all the able-bodied men are conscripted, Will’s yearning to enlist and earn the admiration of pretty Rosie becomes almost irresistible.

What stops him, and keeps him at home as the ultimate saviour of a motley collection of servants and their crazed employers, the Winters, is a mixture of loyalty, fidelity, love and a dawning realisation that he may possess certain qualities of his own. Prue writes with a directness that makes her easy to read, and her story is full of moral subtleties. Will’s imagination, and the eccentricities of the old house itself with its stained-glass window and “bone white stairway”, make this an interesting world to inhabit and explore, but it’s the warmth with which almost all the characters are depicted that is especially engaging. You gnash your teeth at the class system that keeps the good-hearted servants obedient to Mr Winter, “white-faced as a ghoul and as hunched as a beetle”, tricked by conmen and thieves as they try to leave the house, and blind to the way that Will, “the little nobody” as George sneeringly calls him, saves them even before the terrific fight at the climax. Based on the events that took place in Manchester in 1819 after the Peterloo Massacre, this is a wonderful storyteller’s skilled and suspenseful imagining of the different forms that heroism can take.

Hot on the heels of the vogue for Gothic comedy as penned by Lemony Snicket and Chris Priestley comes Gareth P. Jones’s The Thornthwaite Inheritance ((11+, Bloomsbury, £5.99; Buy this book 288pp). It has one of those beautifully simple comic ideas that children instantly love: a twin brother and sister who live only to kill each other.

With their parents killed (or were they murdered?) in bizarre accidents, the 13- year-old Thornthwaite twins Lorelli and Ovid are joint heirs to a fortune. Living in a huge mansion, they have no communication with the outside world and, like the brother and sister in Hilaire Belloc’s poem, each enacts deliciously cunning schemes to become the sole heir. Ever curious, they decide on a wary truce to find out what really killed their parents.

Yet when a crooked lawyer and his handsome son arrive, the pact between them unravels. Who filled a bicycle saddle with honey, to attract a swarm of killer bees — and a bear? What is the meaning of a mysterious piece of music? This is a book certain to make family holidays go with a bang.

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