Ten Essential Children’s Books


As part of the celebrations for our 40th anniversary, we are revising the long-running Ten of the Best feature, and asking six authors to choose the children’s books they consider essential reading. Our thanks to Frank Cottrell-Boyce for this selection.


10


This is the hardest page I’ve ever written. Books were part of the architecture that sheltered me in school, and delighted me at home. Their doors opened into the past, the future and the secret gardens of the present. I always loved being read to and reading aloud so this is a list of books that I enjoyed reading aloud to my own children.


So Much Trish Cooke, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury, Walker Books, 978-1406390728, £7.99 pbk


This book is a wonder. A book about love, and family that swings back and forth between noise and quiet so that you barely notice that it is building up to a brilliantly noisy twist


ending. One of the


few children’s books that finds a place for boredom.A masterpiece


of storytelling beautifully illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. In all the tortured discussions I’ve had with myself about which books to chose, this is the one book that I knew had to be on the list no matter what.


Each Peach Pear Plum


Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Puffin, 978-0141502526, £3.99 pbk


I feel privileged to


have had my children during the Ahlberg era. Everything they did was rich and beautiful. I’ve


gone for this because of the way it encourages the child-listener to join in the poem and the way it weaves together all the riches of our heritage of fairy stories. Each page anticipates the next through some tiny detail in the picture so the child is invited to look really closely at the page and enjoy all the details. A real box of delights.


King of the Copper Mountains Paul Biegel, O/P


The thousand-year old king Mansolain is dying. A kindly doctor goes in search of the herbs that might save him. As the doctor goes on his journey, he meets various


animals - from a horse with


golden hooves, to a beetle and a dragon – and sends them back to the king to tell their stories. He’s hoping that the stories will be exciting enough to keep the king’s heart going. The stories all do – in their


different ways –make your heart beat faster while the overarching story of the king’s fate begins to bring all the tales together in an intricate web.


One Thousand and One


Arabian Nights retold by Geraldine McCaughrean, OUP, 978-0192750136, £8.99pbk


The Thousand and One Nights is a window - or a thousand and one windows – into the golden age of Islam, the era that gave us Averros, Al- Biruni, and Ibn Khaldun. These stories are an essential part of our patrimony. But every child should have a chance to meet them in something like their context – Shaharazad’s great life or death


experiment with suspense. Simple folk tales from India and the Middle East are woven into a gorgeous, sophisticated filigree, playing hide and seek with their own endings. I would highly recommend Geraldine McCaughrean’s retelling for Oxford Story Collections. In fact I’d highly recommend every sentence Geraldine McCaughrean ever wrote.


4 Books for Keeps No.242 May 2020


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