From a swamp monster who speaks in verse to a guinea pig in search of world renown, plus a chilling graphic novel and an adventure in the Amazon

This month, lucky eight-plus readers can plunge into the green wilds of Katherine Rundell’s marvellous new novel, The Explorer (Bloomsbury). Stranded in the Amazon rainforest, Fred, Lila, Max and Con overcome their initial terror to adapt to the uncompromising fierceness and beauty of their surroundings, gradually shedding the constraints of home – and discovering much more than they expected. Hannah Horn’s delicate line drawings encroach, vine-like, on Rundell’s dangerous, intoxicating pages in this love-song to the natural world and those who find release in it. This is essential reading for lovers of Eva Ibbotson.

Also for eight plus comes a Newbery medal-winner by Kelly Barnhill, The Girl Who Drank The Moon (Piccadilly) – a poignant, humorous fantasy with glints of Margaret Mahy, Neil Gaiman and Robin McKinley. It features a village that sacrifices its children and a witch who saves them, a swamp monster who speaks in mellifluous poetry and a girl growing up perilously powerful, without knowing why. This is a gorgeously stratified and satisfying novel, full of archetypal, bone-deep fairytale resonances.

Bestselling Murder Most Unladylike author Robin Stevens turns to homage, meanwhile, in The Guggenheim Mystery (Puffin), both a tremendous art-theft whodunnit and a loving tribute to the much-missed author Siobhan Dowd. This sequel to Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery scoops up Ted, a rigid thinker with a gift for analysis, his tempestuous sister Kat and Salim, his cousin, with an assured and gentle hand, setting them down in New York City, where Ted and Kat’s Aunt Gloria is a curator at the Guggenheim art museum. When a Kandinsky is stolen and Gloria is arrested, though, it’s up to the young detectives to clear her name ... Stevens’s deft, philosophical writing lends itself perfectly to her continuation of Dowd’s work.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hervé Tullet’s Say Zoop!. Photograph: Chronicle Books

For readers who like a frisson of fear, Pam Smy’s ominous, hefty hardback, Thornhill (David Fickling), is a rule-breaker in the vein of Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret – a skin-crawling story of a derelict house haunted by past cruelties, told almost entirely via illustration, with some help from found texts and tattered ancient diaries. Smy’s intense chiaroscuro, delicately drawn handmade dolls and spare, evocative detail, with pure black pages marking the division of days, combine to create an unsettling, deeply memorable read.

Elsewhere, in picture-books for much younger children, Press Here creator Hervé Tullet returns with Say Zoop! (Chronicle), an anarchically interactive mixture of white space, coloured dots and reader-supplied sound, with a Fantasia feel to its imaginative sparseness. Press the blue dot and say OH – get louder or softer, wavery or still – add a yellow dot, AH – and the delightful mayhem can only end in a rainbow universe of sound.

In a departure from previous, playfully epistolary picture-books, Tom Percival takes to the skies with Perfectly Norman (Bloomsbury), starring a boy hero who is unremarkable until he grows a pair of wings. Worried that people will think his soaring antics weird, he conceals them beneath a coat – but what are others hiding in their turn? This joyous, original paean to individuality is sophisticated but deftly judged; quirky children just starting to sense the invisible burden of peer-group disapproval should find it especially heartening.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Story of Tutankhamun by Patricia Cleveland-Peck. Photograph: Bloomsbury Publishing

Meanwhile, Izzy Gizmo, by Pip Jones and Sara Ogilvie (Simon & Schuster), features an inventor girl, a disabled crow, an encouraging granddad and a thumbs-up to resilience. Izzy’s strange devices don’t always work as they should – but when she designs prosthetic wings for a wounded bird, her grandfather pushes her to persist, despite failure and fury. Jones’s loping, engaging rhymes and Ogilvie’s vivacious images evoke both inspiration and frustration.

There’s more from Pip Jones for five-to-eight-year-olds in Piggy Handsome (Faber), the turbulent tale of a grandiloquent guinea pig. Disconsolate to have reached the age of three (that’s 30 in guinea pig years) with nothing to show for it, Handsome sets off to the seaside to achieve world renown, with a gruff budgie named Jeffry for company. Engagingly silly wordplay, bumbling burglars and Adam Stower’s diverting drawings make for a winningly frivolous formula.

Young readers with a yen for Egyptology have a treat in store with The Story of Tutankhamun (Bloomsbury), a richly involving non-fiction title from Patricia Cleveland-Peck, interlaid with Isabel Greenberg’s charismatic illustrations. Moving smoothly from the boy king’s daily life to the discovery and excavation of his tomb, it’s packed with accessible, intriguing information.

From 360 Degrees is the fascinating In Focus – Cities, created by Libby Walden, and featuring illustrations from 10 artists, each bringing a unique and appropriate style to their allocated city. From the secrets of London’s Royal Mail post train to the smoke-signals of the Vatican, the detail hiding beneath the oversized flaps creates a real sense of insider knowledge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Izzy Gizmo, by Pip Jones and Sara Ogilvie. Photograph: Simon and Schuster

For teenagers, MA Bennett reinvigorates the boarding-school thriller with her debut S.T.A.G.S (Hot Key), set in the eponymous St Aidan the Great School, where tension runs high between the Medievals – the aristocratic student elite, who shun modern tech as inimical to their traditions – and those less sophisticated pupils dubbed Savages. When scholarship girl Greer receives a cryptic invitation to the head Medieval’s country house offering “huntin’, shootin’, fishin’”, she is flattered enough to accept – only to discover the quarry isn’t what she expected. This is a darkly compelling examination of the allure of privilege, and the unscrupulous means by which it preserves itself.

More light-heartedly, seasoned collaborators Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison (Lobsters, Never Evers) return with Freshers (Chicken House), a hilarious, truthful-feeling immersion in the mandatory “fun”, self-reinvention and stranger-crowded loneliness of freshers’ week. Narrated by Luke, who is navigating a long-distance break-up, and Phoebe, nursing a long-held crush on Luke, it’s a messy, cringey, comically evocative no-mance.

Finally, from Stripes, A Change Is Gonna Come is a wide-ranging and dynamic anthology by 12 black and minority ethnic authors. From Phoebe Roy’s feather-growing teenage girl to Inua Ellams’s poetic summary of experience left behind, it deals compellingly with its Ovidian theme of change. With work from familiar names (Nikesh Shukla, Catherine Johnson) and newcomers (Aisha Busby, Mary Florence Bello), there is considerable variety – but never a dud note.