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...

When Michael Franks won the annual Wingate Prize yesterday for his memoir the Mighty Franks, a dazzling portrait of an eccentric Los Angeles family, it set the seal on what looks to be an annus mirabilis for a new kind of heroine....

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...