MATT Haig, author of best-selling depression memoir, Reasons To Stay Alive, delivered unto us an instant Christmas classic in the form of the irresistible A Boy Called Christmas last year. The only problem was, while it was perfectly fine for girls, it was boy-heavy, and mostly populated by male figures, from Nikolas through to Father Topol and even the mouse and the reindeer. So, it’s great that Haig has come back this year with The Girl Who Saved Christmas (Canongate, £12.99).

His Amelia Wishart, a 11-year-old chimney sweep, is clearly more than up to the task of saving Christmas for girls aged around eight years old and upwards, as, on the verge of giving up hope, she heads off to Elfhelm to rescue a Santa who is besieged by trolls. It’s a plucky adventure tale in which Haig reminds us of and reworks the meaning of Christmas, pinning it onto a message of hope, and it’s all the more heart-warming because Haig backs it up with a realism about grief and hard times.

Also bringing a whole new dimension to Christmas mythology for younger readers, again mostly boys, is Christmasaurus (Penguin, £12.99), by McFly singer Tom Fletcher, who previously co-authored the popular picture book series, The Dinosaur That Pooped. This is Fletcher’s first novel and, with oodles of charm and silliness, it follows William, a bullied wheelchair-using boy, who heads off to the North Pole one Christmas. There he meets, among other characters, a dinosaur, who was found as an egg in the frozen ice. This Christmasaurus really wants to be a reindeer. It’s filled with quirky details such as the fact that Santa’s sleigh is powered by the playing of vinyl records on its gramophone.

One story that feels like it’s already a well-worn classic is The Secret of Nightingale Wood by Lucy Strange (Chicken House Books, £6.99). Set just after the end of the Great War, it follows Henrietta as her family moves to a big house in the countryside, escaping the bad memories around the tragic death of her brother. It’s a lonely life – her father is working abroad, her mother is mentally ill and being treated by a terrifying doctor – and Henrietta’s main companions are characters in the novels she reads. That is, until she meets Moth, the wild woman who lives in the nearby woods.

But the book that most bewitched me was AF Harrold’s enchanting and menacing The Song From Somewhere Else (Bloomsbury, £12.99). In this tale, Frank, a girl plagued by bullies, is helped by the large, lumbering Nick, an outcast in her school. She finds herself seeking refuge in his home, where she starts to hear strange, distant, magical music. This, it turns out, are sounds from another world, reachable through the door to the cellar beneath. A poignant story of friendship, broodingly illustrated by Levi Pinfold.

There is a shadow-world too in the absorbing Maybe A Fox (Walker, £6.99), co-authored by Pulitzer prize nominee Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee. Sylvie disappears while out running, and on the same night a fox is born. The story alternates between chapters told by Jules, her sister, trying to deal with her grief, and this fox, half-animal, half-spirit, connected to Sylvie, in an intriguing tale of loss.

And, when it comes to fiction pitched at girls, you can’t go wrong with Jacqueline Wilson whose Clover Moon (Random House, £12.99) delivers a compelling new Victorian heroine, who, like the author’s popular Hetty Feather, has had a difficult start in life – abusive stepmother, drunken father – but holds on to her dreams.

But it’s also good to have a bit of ho-ho-ho at Christmas. This season brings a barrage of rib-tickling books from masters of the comic novel for the young, from Liz Pichon’s 11th Tom Gates: DogZombies Rule (For Now) (Scholastic, £10.99) to Jeff Kinney’s eleventh Diary Of A Wimpy Kid, Double Down (Penguin, £12.99) and AniMalcolm (HarperCollins, £12.99), the third high-concept children’s novel by David Baddiel, about a boy, born into a pet-loving family, who hates animals. To my mind funniest of all, though, is Julian Clary’s The Bolds To The Rescue (Andersen, £6.99), the second of his hilarious series about a family of hyenas trying to masquerade as humans in suburban England.