A lovely book for parents to share with a small child. Simple text and simple images, carefully chosen, carefully designed; it’s a vehicle for conveying love and helping a small child to feel welcome in the world and part of it.
Beegu’s a long way from home. Her flying saucer crash lands on Earth. She’s worried she won’t ever see her mother again and Earth is very strange. But she finds some children, and they are nice and then… she hears her mother. A book with few words and pictures that subtly convey great emotional heft….
A lovely warm book with some of the silliness a child can enjoy. At the same time it quietly addresses the development of a child’s existence as she becomes distinct and other than her parents. Alice’s mum and dad don’t notice there’s lion in the house for ages and when they do they have completely…
This is one of the few books illustrated by Harold Jones still in print. It was a major undertaking, with nursery rhymes fitted into picture pages throughout. He said of his work, ‘A book is a complete unity. I always plan it from endpaper to endpaper and try to keep the spirit of the first…
New Zealand setting and New Zealand author, this was first published in 1957 and reissued as a Penguin Classics in the early 2000s. It has been deservedly held in high regard, though on occasion set as a school text for teenagers and therefore hated by some of them. It is certainly a novel for older…
‘Just on the other side of the wall’. Ah, how often did the young Frances Hodgson Burnett wonder what lay there, when by the sudden death of her father she was plunged from middle-class comfort into years of precariousness like her heroine Sara, the princess of this story (and surely so like the young and indeed…
I suppose we might say that the Iron Man is Ted Hughes himself, the strong man who fell off a cliff and broke into pieces, but then painstakingly found the pieces and bolted them back together. Eating tractors and cars and barbed wire, he sought to eat up the modern world and let something more…
