Newspapers and novels – fact and fiction – are often seen as polar opposites. But as a writer of both, I have come to find that fiction and non-fiction are simply two sides of the same coin.

My YA Nordic thriller, The Sharp Edge of a Snowflake, was inspired by two of the biggest news stories of last year and the fearless women behind them. In 2018, the journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed that a British company called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent and used it to influence elections. Around the same time the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum. In 2018, the actor and activist Rose McGowan released her captivating book, Brave, in which she exposed the predatory misogyny within the film industry and told of how the most influential man in Hollywood sexually assaulted her.

Reality is complicated. Working both as a novelist and a journalist, I often feel there is greater truth in fiction than facts. But how can fiction be truth?

Writing fiction is like knitting. Reality is a tangled ball of yarn. It’s a mess. Bringing order to the confused mess that is human existence and turning it into a story does not make it any less authentic, any less true. Our times are like a tangled ball of yarn. When you knit a sweater out of it, it is still yarn.

Good fiction helps us make sense of the world around us while still enabling us to lose ourselves in the story. Below are my top 10 novels for young adults about current affairs.

1. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

A reassuring trivia for all aspiring writers: before Angie Thomas wrote The Hate U Give, she’d written another book that was rejected by more than 150 agents. In 2017, Thomas’s debut became a publishing sensation. It went straight into the bestseller chart and stayed there for a year. It’s a powerful look at the Black Lives Matter movement. A mandatory read that should be on the syllabus of every school, everywhere.

2. Fated by Teri Terry

We need to talk about Brexit … no, wait, don’t stop reading. Years before the Brexit referendum, Teri Terry wrote the dystopian Slated trilogy, set in a world where the UK has left the European Union and closed its borders. A brutal government wipes clean the minds of young people suspected of crimes against the state. Now Terry is back with a brand-new prequel to the trilogy that is actually inspired by the real-life Brexit. In Fated, she explores how her fictional post-Brexit world came to be. It’s eerie to see how life sometimes imitates art.

3. The Casket of Time by Andri Snær Magnason

This book is a hybrid of sci-fi and fairytale. The world is in an economic crisis. But instead of facing it, people turn to a new invention. The TimeBox halts time for the person inside it. You don’t like Mondays or the Trump era? Just skip right over them. But what happens when everyone just hides away in their TimeBoxes, burying their heads in the sand? Just like in real life, the problems keep piling up. And just like in real life, it’s the young who come to the rescue (think climate change and Greta Thunberg). Rebecca Solnit described the book as “the love child of Chomsky and Lewis Carroll”.

Juno Dawson, whose book Meat Market deals with the underbelly of the fashion industry. Photograph: Eivind Hansen

4. Meat Market by Juno Dawson

Having worked on the fringes of the fashion industry as a journalist, Juno Dawson started to realise there was a problem. The models, often very young girls, nameless faces and bodies of the global fashion industry, were not always treated well by photographers, agents and designers. Meat Market tells the story of an ordinary girl from a south London estate who is thrust into the world of high fashion where she discovers the seedy underbelly of the beauty industry.

5. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson

What is news? Well, how long is a piece of string? Is true crime news? I don’t know. But it certainly has become a popular form of entertainment. We seem to have an unquenchable thirst for podcasts such as Serial and documentaries such as Making a Murderer. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a novel inspired by true crime. The format of the book mimics the form of the true crime shows we know and love; though the book isn’t based on any one case, almost everything that happens is partly inspired by an actual crime.

6. Burial Rites by Hannah Kent

A young woman accused of murder is sent to a remote farm where she is to wait for her execution. The book is based on a true story, and I have a confession to make: I’m a descendant of the man who beheaded her, Iceland’s last executioner. In 1829, Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Friðrik Sigurðsson were sentenced to death for the murder of Natan Ketilsson. When it came down to it no one wanted to do the beheading. My forefather, Guðmundur Ketilsson, the brother of the murder victim, was persuaded to do it. It’s a murder case that has captivated Icelanders for 200 years. Did they really do it? Why did they do it? Was Agnes really the evil temptress the courts made her out to be? It was the news story of the 18th century, and if they’d had televisions back then, people would have been following the case on true crime specials over a bowl of popcorn.

A memorial plaque at the spot where Stephen Lawrence was murdered – the tragic starting point for Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses series. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

7. Crossfire by Malorie Blackman

It’s almost 20 years since the first book in the groundbreaking Noughts & Crosses series was published. The series, which explores racism through alternative history and is set in a world where black people rule over white people, was inspired by the Stephen Lawrence murder case. This fifth book in the series, however, is influenced by the dystopian feel of our current political climate. “The results of the UK Brexit referendum and the US presidential election in 2016,” Blackman writes in the preface to Crossfire, “brought home to me just how potent the politics of fear and division can be.”

8. American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

If it weren’t for Donald Trump, we’d still be gasping over what an awful president George W Bush turned out to be. American Wife is the literary reimagining of one man’s journey to the White House seen through the eyes of his long-suffering wife – a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Laura Bush.

Refugees and migrants wait to be rescued from a boat in the Mediterranean – a crisis dealt with in the graphic novel Illegal. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

9. Illegal by Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano

Illegal is a thought-provoking graphic novel that explores the plight of immigrants embarking on perilous journeys in the hope of a better life. According to Donkin, the inspiration for Illegal was a newspaper article “about the size of a postage stamp” that haunted him about a boat sinking in the Mediterranean with 215 people on board. “Eoin and I talked about it, and waited for the follow-up report with the names of the people lost, but no report ever came.”

10. Oranges in No Man’s Land by Elizabeth Laird

A couple of months ago, the UN asked: “Is the world becoming numb to the killing of children in Syria?” Oranges in No Man’s Land is set in Lebanon during the civil war. The book is based on Laird’s personal story: she stayed on the green line in Beirut in 1977 in a war-damaged flat with her husband and six-month-old son, who slept in a suitcase on the floor and took his first steps on their bullet-riddled balcony. It’s a touching book that reminds us that we’re not allowed to shield ourselves with apathy when it comes to children and war.