THOUGH it was always a pleasure to dive into the uproarious world of Babette Cole’s Princess Smartypants in its vivid picture-book form, it was about time the girl-power heroine got her own full-length tale – which is exactly what Cole has produced in honour of the character’s 30th birthday. Princess Smartypants And The Missing Princes (Hodder Children’s, £5.99) delivers all the child-friendly feminist quips that one might hope for. Here, the “happily unmarried” Smartypants is organising an engagement party for friends Snowy, Cindy and Punzie, when suddenly all their princes disappear. Smartypants naturally has to rescue and retrieve these spoilt wimps: whingey Prince Charming who complains of missing Top Carriage, whiney Prince Handsome whose mother warms his socks and pyjamas, and Prince Daring who moans about Punzie’s frog-ridden hair.

Meanwhile, the big book launch for younger readers this autumn is The Royal Rabbits Of London by Santa Montefiore and husband Simon Sebag Montefiore (Simon & Schuster, £10.99), a tale inspired by their son, Sasha, who imagined “a society of rabbits living underneath Buckingham Palace”. At first it feels like Watership Down, as we meet Horatio rabbit, elderly and grizzled, with only a stump for a front paw. But soon it turns into a riotous and surreal London adventure-tale, following shy, country rabbit Shylo, who has caught wind of a plot by cigarette-smoking, camera-wielding Ratzi’s, to get into the Queen’s bedroom and photograph her in her nightie. A rip-roaring adventure that, not surprisingly, is already in development by Fox as a film.

Some of the best new dark, fantasy fiction for middle grade and older readers comes from Scotland. Ross MacKenzie’s The Nowhere Emporium won the Blue Peter Award, and he returns with Shadowsmith (Kelpies, £6.99), a Stranger Things-meets-Harry Potter tale, featuring some chilling witches, utterly terrifying monsters and an impressive, super-powered heroine, in Amelia Pigeon. Eleven-year-old Kirby has been struggling since his mother fell into a coma following an accident, when Amelia turns up. She can cope with anything, which is useful given that all hell seems to have arrived in Kirby’s otherwise sleepy Scottish fishing village. Spookily funny and enthralling.

But the big autumn debut is The Beginning Woods by Malcolm McNeill (Pushkin, £7.99), a dazzling and beguiling tale from this Edinburgh resident. Deeply rooted in the fantasy genre, but original, wonderful and petrifying, it tells the story of the mysterious Vanishings, a phenomenon in which, suddenly for no reason, people have started disappearing into thin air, leaving only their clothes behind. At the heart of it is Max, abandoned in a bookshop as a baby, adopted from a strange orphanage, constantly trying to retrieve the memories of his parents, yet also, unbeknownst to him, connected to these Vanishings. A mesmerising new voice in Scottish fantasy fiction, and a book that deserves to vanish off the bookshop shelves.

Zana Fraillon’s The Bone Sparrow (Orion, £12.99) is a tale from an Australian writer, rooted in the troubled realities of our times. Fraillon has brought us the story of Subhi, born in a detention centre after his mother fled violence and persecution in their homeland of Burma, and his links with Jimmie, a local girl, whom he has met through a hole in the barbed wire fence. What’s most compelling about this book is Subhi himself. All nine years of his life have been spent in the centre, watched over by guards. Days pass under a cloud of pointlessness and boredom, yet he remains buoyant, entertained by the stories and creatures of his imagination: birds and sea animals he has never seen. Inspirational, and a reminder of the dislocated hardship so many hundreds of thousands of people endure.

Another hotly-awaited novel is gripping teen noir Kid Got Shot by Simon Mason (David Fickling Books, £10), the second of his Garvie Smith’s mystery, and a follow-up to Running Girl. Garvie, an Afro-Caribbean teenage Sherlock Holmes, is as entertaining and infuriating (for his mother, at least) as he was in his first book. He is still a spliff-smoking maths whiz who avoids school work and lives on his wits, and still capable of putting together all the clues, in an “elementary, my dear Watson” type of manner. The child who gets shot is Pyotr Gimpel, a reclusive Polish boy with a violin case and an autism-spectrum disorder. What’s impressive yet again is its seeming urban authenticity and the diversity of Mason’s characters.

If Mason’s Garvie Smith occasionally pushes boundaries that’s nothing on Manuela Salvi’s Girl Detached (Bucket List, £7.99), which was banned in the author’s native Italy. Salvi has created a feminist, awareness-raising tale of sexual grooming of teens, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. Sixteen-year-old Alexsandra struggles with a stutter. She has recently lost her grandmother, who raised her, and is living with her estranged mother when, through a neighbour’s daughter, she’s introduced to Ruben, and a whole world of gifts, fancy clothes, drugs and wild parties. Rapidly, she’s out of her depth in a tale that is both convincing and disturbing. Like Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It, it’s a thoughtful analysis of some of the perils for young women today.