In 2016, zoologist and children’s author Nicola Davies heard a story about a girl from a refugee camp who turned up at school but was sent away because there was no chair for her. Troubled by this and other news stories in the weeks that followed, she felt compelled to write a poem. Two years later that has become a powerful and affecting picture book, The Day War Came, illustrated by Rebecca Cobb (Walker, £10).

To create a book like this for children is no mean feat. Stories like these may seem too challenging for the young. We may think they require too much explanation. But this is exactly what is needed to help them understand the complex world they might find in their schools, or their own lives. The Day War Came ends with a call to the power of kindness. It’s also a book that, for me, gave new meaning to the term unputdownable.

A child’s experience of war and its aftermath is also the subject of Shirley Hughes’ Ruby In The Ruins (Walker, £12.99). Here, we’re in London, during the Blitz, and Ruby is clinging to her mum in a big double bed, as terrifying explosions echo around them. Hughes, whose great gift has always been to tell ordinary everyday children’s stories, of losing a toy or camping, applies that same familiar style to war, as if it too were just another part of life. But it’s almost a little too cosy – Dad comes back, the ruins left by the bombs become a children’s playground, the family soldiers on.

What it means to be a child from “somewhere else” is at the heart of Island Born by Junot Diaz, illustrated by Leo Espinosa (Rock The Boat, £10.99). Diaz is a Pulitzer prize winner and has been in the news lately because of #MeToo allegations. Don't let that impact on your reading of this story about Lola, a young girl who was born on “the Island” but can remember nothing of her early days. She embarks on a quest and begins asking everyone she knows from the island to tell her their tales – of the sweetness of mangoes, “music in the air”, and a “monster” who terrorised the land.

Another type of relocation – tales of “incredible animal journeys” – is the subject of Migration, a spellbinding book by Mike Unwin and Jenni Desmond (Bloomsbury, £12.99). The humming bird’s 800km yearly flight across the Gulf of Mexico, the 100km march of the emperor penguin across Antarctica – these are just a few of the trips described and breathtakingly illustrated in this book. Natural history writer Mike Unwin has a way of describing the wonder, science and drama of these voyages that makes them as poetic as a David Attenborough documentary.

If you want a retort for your kids when they declare “I hate my life” because they haven’t had enough time on the Xbox, an easy option is to hand them So You Think You’ve Got It Bad? A Kid’s Life In Ancient Egypt, by Chae Strathie and Marisa Morea (Nosy Crow, £12.99). This entertaining book, in the Horrible Histories tradition, reminds children that at least they’ve got running water, medicine that isn’t made from poo, and cereals rather than onions for breakfast.

There’s also plenty out there for monster hunters this season. Lari Don, always wonderful at delivering old tales to modern audiences, brings us The Treasure Of The Loch Ness Monster, illustrated by Nataša Ilin?i? (Kelpies, £6.99), based on stories about Urquhart castle. Meanwhile, Cloo Clayton and Allison Soye have follow up to their charming Maggie’s Mittens, with a book about the real monsters that are out there. Maggie’s Monsters (Black & White, £6.99) features their determined young heroine who is travelling the country, from the Firth of Forth to Tobermory in search of real monsters. The brightly-coloured illustrations might work a charm for Visit Scotland.

For older readers, or perhaps sharing with all the family, is Wee Folk Tales In Scots by Donald Smith (Luath, £7.99), a collection of classic stories about the wee folk selkies, the cailleach and Whuppity Storrie. These days kids can have a whole library of modern fiction translated into Scots, from Julia Donaldson through to Roald Dahl. Here you can find some of the originals, as they might have been told.

Lovers of magic and speculative worlds will fall for Juman Malouf’s The Trilogy of Two (Pushkin, £7.99), a tale of circus twins who discover their burgeoning magical powers. Set in a captivating dystopia in which the world’s cities have grown to “unprecedented sizes” and walled themselves off from the outside, it also has a heart. A wonderful trapeze act of a book, with touches of Jacqueline Wilson and Philip Pullman.

We talk about childhood having changed – kids spend too much time on phones and don’t get to roam like they used to. David Almond’s atmospheric The Colour Of The Sun (Hodder, £12.99) takes us back to a time when kids were kicked out the house during long summer days. The book feels and smells so strongly of the time and place in which it is set, the environment of Skellig author Almond’s own childhood in the North East of England. Yet still I could sense that my own son, reading it, with me, at 11 years old, was rapt.

Almond’s narrator, Davie, relates a single summer day in the holidays, in which he sees a murdered corpse. On the cusp of adulthood, and clinging to his childhood toys as he starts that day, he is pushed out the door by his mother with the words,“The day is long, the world is wide, you’re young and free.” It’s a beautiful book, rippling with thirst for life, and a hymn to the old kind of wandering. I can’t recommend it highly enough, not just for children but for adults who may glimpse their own adolescent awakenings in its pages.

I’m a big advocate of historical fiction for young people as a way of catching a glimpse of past lives and gaining a perspective on the present. Television presenter, Lucy Worsley follows up her My Name Is Victoria with Lady Mary (Bloomsbury, £6.99), the story of Henry the Eighth and Catharine of Aragon’s divorce, as told, fascinatingly, through their daughter Mary’s eyes.

Slave To Fortune (Createspace, £10.99) is a gripping self-published historical thriller by Edinburgh-based D J Munro and one of those books that brings to life a piece of the past that’s little known - that of white people sold into slavery during the 17th Century from English coastal villages. The story, an homage to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, follows Tom Cheke, a young Isle Of Wight boy kidnapped by Barbary Corsairs and sold in Algiers. It has the feel of a classic.

Meanwhile, probably the most pertinent books about modern life are coming from a generation of American black female writers writing for the YA market. Among them is performance poet Elizabeth Acevedo, whose The Poet X (Egmont, £7.99) has the same buzz about it as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give last year. Written in verse, and telling the story of an Afro-Latina poet growing up in Harlem, dealing with body image, street harassment, strict religion, and her first love, it is a tour de force.

Among the most daring publications in Young Adult fiction in recent months has to be Juno Dawson’s Clean (Quercus, £7.99), which delivers not only a gut-wrenching description of the process of heroin withdrawal, but also a tale of excess and the emptiness of glamour, as it follows its rich, socialite teen in rehab. Dawson, a trans-activist, and hugely popular YA author, has written a novel that pulls no punches, spares no detail in its description of addiction, and contains language about as blue as you’re going to get in YA. So there’s the parental advisory warning over. But it’s also a rollercoaster of a read, which seems terrifyingly authentic. I was hooked.