Cold, magic, adventure, family, comedy, fires in the dark – we all know what makes for a wonderful Christmas story. The bulging sack of children’s books could cause Santa’s sleigh to sink. Cressida Cowell and Neal Layton’s deliciously droll Emily...
Ever since Ibsen’s Nora walked out of the “doll’s house”, literature has been questioning marriage and patriarchy. Many of the greatest novels, plays and films we have revolve around the consequences of wives choosing adultery over convention. The price for 19th-century heroines,...
One thing that many adult readers find when we encounter modern literature is how seldom it gives us the momentum and sense of wonder we found in books when we were children. Where are the vivid characters, the adventures, the...
The phenomenon by which groups of animals all suddenly begin to copy a new behaviour – like blue-tits learning to open milk bottle tops – has been termed morphic resonance. Something very similar to the blue-tits’ discovery has recently been...
The Beast from the East may have delayed spring, but at least we have great new kids’ stories from north, south, east and west.
Until quite recently, the myths that a Western child would encounter for education or entertainment tended to be those of either Classical antiquity or the Bible. Perhaps it is this that gave Norse myth, with its tales of ice, ravens,...
“Yes, oh dear yes, the novel tells a story.” If I had to trace the death of the novel – or at least a prolonged attempt to kill it – to a single phrase, this is it. EM Forster wrote...
Few readers will fail to spot this has been a golden year for children’s books. With Philip Pullman’s magisterial return to the world of His Dark Materials in La Belle Sauvage, and Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s rapturously received nature-fest The Lost...
If keeping your spirits up in the past month has been difficult, then the best children’s books may be a present to yourself. I am emerging from the duvet much as Moses came down from the mountain, to say there...
Lappin's account of her life as a mulitple émigré is shot through with sadness and euphoria.