Jacqueline Wilson: Dustbin Baby; Vicky Angel

By MARGIE THOMSON

April is the Dustbin Baby, shoved by her mother into a rubbish bin straight after birth, and fortunately found by a passer-by. Now aged 14 April is fostered by a kind but old-fashioned woman called Marion, but in the intervening years she has lived in an extraordinary number of homes: adopted briefly, and then living at an assortment of institutional residences where she often got into trouble.

April is driven by the need to discover her past. She sets out to retrace her own footsteps, in turn visiting each place where she has lived but, really, on a desperate search for the mother whose identity she has never known.

Wilson is brilliant at this kind of social realism - cleverly producing places and personalities that ring sometimes brutally true, and then pitting a vulnerable-tough child against them.

But she's great at creating goodies, too, and just as in life itself, we find both saints and sinners at every level of society. Dustbin Baby is extraordinarily moving, and if you've got dry eyes at book's end you're more hard-hearted than I.

Vicky Angel is out in paperback, and it too is like an emotional punch in the stomach. Jade's best friend, Vicky, has been hit by a car and killed, but that is not going to stop Vicky making her presence felt.

She is as sparky and controlling in death as she was in life, and she's determined to stop Jade moving on into new friendships.

It's trademark Wilson: a funny/sad, wise exploration of friendship, guilt and grief.

Dustbin Baby

Doubleday

$36.95

Vicki Angel

Corgi

$16.95