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...
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...
“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.