THE literary world is currently witnessing a boom in young adult writing, especially since J.K. Rowling showed it could cross over into an adult market and make serious money. Writing in Slate, Ruth Graham urges people to read voraciously, but claims, “you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children”.

Whatever gets people reading books should be celebrated. Far more embarrassing than adults reading teenage books is the poor state of diversity in young adult (YA) fiction. In 2013, less than three per cent of children’s and young adult books depicted non-white characters. Malinda Lo writes that those YA novels that do represent diversity of ethnicity, sexuality, or disability tend to prompt four main reactions. Trade reviews regard these books as “scarcely plausible”, and think that “readers may be surprised” that they contain “too many issues”, which are “a lot to decode”. The subtext is: any young adult book that ventures beyond white, heterosexual, able-bodied characters and themes will unsettle expected norms and alienate its readership.

Luckily, there is an emerging group of British Pakistani young adult writers successfully challenging these mainstream assumptions, about colour at least. The most senior among them, Tariq Mehmood, was born in Mirpur in 1956 and came to Britain as a young man. There he lived in Bradford and became a respected leftist political activist, filmmaker, and writer of literary and children’s fiction. He has a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster and now teaches at the American University of Beirut. Speaking at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies’ literature festival in March, Mehmood said that when he is in Pakistan, he always finds himself defending Christians and in Britain he speaks up for Muslims. In other words, this is a writer who is on the side of scapegoated minorities.

This is clearly apparent in his new YA novel, You’re Not Proper. The book alternates between the perspectives of two 14-year-olds living in a divided northern English town. Biracial Kiran is also known as Karen, while her archenemy is the hijab-wearing Shamshad. Reacting to peer pressure from her white friends, Kiran insults Shamshad, calling her a “scarfie”. Similarly, Shamshad looks down on Kiran as she becomes increasingly religious, insisting that the girl can never be a “proper” Muslim due to her mixed heritage.

As well as exploring the issues of racial in-betweenness and a rise in religiosity in racist Britain, Mehmood also explores the fallout from the war in Afghanistan. Dex is a white British soldier from the girls’ town who has gone missing while fighting in Afghanistan. Dex’s plight inspires demonstrations by the far-right group, the English Defence League. If this part of the plotline seems unfinished, that is because in his next YA novel Mehmood is going to write the story of this soldier, the first time he has focused on a white character.

Also from Yorkshire, Sufiya Ahmed published her award-winning Secrets of the Henna Girl with Puffin Books in 2012. Its epigraph is the injunction, “obtain the virgin’s consent before you marry her”. The YA novel centres round a 16-year-old girl, Zeba Khan, who is being forced into marriage with a cousin by her parents. Set in northern England and Pakistan, this is a story of girls’ rights and empowerment. Ahmed decided to write the book when she was working as a parliamentary researcher for an MP in the 2000s. It was through her work in parliament that she met a group of Asian women activists who were campaigning to raise awareness about the issue of forced marriage as an ongoing problem in these communities. Some of these activists were also campaigning to make forced marriages illegal in the UK. The law to make forced marriages illegal was subsequently passed in 2014.

Ahmed makes a clear distinction between arranged and forced marriage, showing that unlike an arranged marriage, a forced marriage can never turn out well. She is now writing a book about acid attacks on women in India, demonstrating that this is a writer with a strong commitment to women’s human rights.

In the light of discussion in my last column of Lila Abu-Lughod’s argument about the Western “saviour discourse”, it is important to note Ahmed writes about these issues with sensitivity and isn’t so simplistic as to blame female oppression on Islam. Indeed, her earliest book might be put in the category that Karin van Nieuwkerk terms “pious art”. Ahmed’s book, Zahra’s First Term at the Khadija Academy was shortlisted for a Muslim Writers Award. It is set in a girls’ Islamic boarding school and features an indomitable hijab-wearing heroine.

There has been a lot of literature about Partition, but little that is written explicitly for the teen market. Irfan Master’s A Beautiful Lie (2011) is therefore an unusual YA novel in dealing with the traumatic events of 1947. Master’s father is from Gujarat, India where the novel is set, and his mother is from Pakistan. The novel’s central premise is that his 13-year-old character Bilal lies to his dying father, known as Bapuji, to make him think that Partition is not taking place. This has coincidental echoes with the 2003 German film, Good Bye Lenin!, in which an advocate of East Germany goes into a coma and wakes up with her family pretending the Wall hasn’t come down and reunification hasn’t happened. Perhaps this exploration of lies and pretence around cataclysmic events is currently part of the zeitgeist because of heightened awareness of politicians’ subterfuge in our post-WikiLeaks and now post-Edward Snowden world.

Given the context about which Master is writing — Partition, with its political rhetoric of secularism and irredeemable enmity — the topic of lying seems peculiarly appropriate.

Fiction itself is a kind of lie; and historical fiction, with its intermixture of true events and fabrication, makes it difficult to tell fact from fiction. What is truth anyway? Is it worth telling hard truths to vulnerable people who are going to be hurt by them? Bilal says to his brother, who is pro-Pakistan and thinks they should tell their father about Partition:

“What truth do you represent, Bhai? Smashing somebody’s head in with a stick isn’t any kind of truth I recognise. Is that the truth you want me to tell Bapuji about? I’ve seen what’s going on with my own eyes. If that’s the truth, I don’t want it.”

Despite his tender age, the younger brother is more clear-sighted about Partition than the adults who have been corrupted by various ideologies.

“Children narrators,” argues the critic Sujala Singh, “function as bridges, as interpretive filters informing and educating the reader about violence ‘out there’”. The use of a child narrator is fairly common in talking about violent events in South Asian adult literature such as Indian Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Sri Lankan Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Pakistani Bina Shah’s Slum Child. These British authors transpose the child narrator successfully into the realm of YA fiction. They give us stereotype-quashing but critical novels about religion, gender, violence, and families. Taken together, these novels sound a melodious, authentic note that cuts through the monotone voices coming out of YA writing.

CLAIRE CHAMBERS teaches global literature at the University of York and is the author of British Muslim Fictions: Interviews with Contemporary Writers.