A decade ago, it seemed likely that children’s books would fall victim to the digital age, paperbacks cast aside for Kindles, picture books swiped on iPads. A recent survey of 1,000 parents by charity BookTrust revealed that 26% were subcontracting bedtime stories to Alexa or other home assistants. But the same study showed that 83% preferred “real” books and the sustained boom in the children’s book market is testament to this. David Walliams may have dominated the charts again – he is likely to have the year’s three bestselling children’s books – but, as our reviewers’ choices reveal, look deeper and range, quality and innovation abound.
Children’s books have never been more relevant, echoing the big issues of the day. Titles about mental health and emotions are everywhere, from Sam Copeland and illustrator Sarah Horne’s funny Charlie Changes Into a Chicken (Puffin) and Rebecca Westcott’s Can You See Me? (Scholastic) – whose co-author is 11-year-old Libby Scott, a girl with autism – to Bryony Gordon’s teenage self-help guide You Got This (Wren & Rook). Michael Morpurgo and Onjali Q Rauf were among those addressing the refugee crisis in Boy Giant (HarperColllins) and The Boy at the Back of the Class (Orion) respectively, while Malorie Blackman’s return to the world of Noughts & Crosses in Crossfire (Penguin) combined taut thriller with themes of racism, division and media bias.
For a generation growing up with Greta Thunberg and climate strikes, saving the planet will be 2020’s lead story in children’s books, foreshadowed this year by Greta and the Giants (Frances Lincoln), written by Zoe Tucker and illustrated by Zoe Persico, Neal Layton’s A Planet Full of Plastic (Wren & Rook) and Lily Dyu’s Earth Heroes (Nosy Crow), illustrated by Jackie Lay. In a world where news cycles and social media expose children to current events as never before, these are books that reflect reality and offer young readers, parents and teachers a place to explore.
The cultural impact of children’s books resonated far beyond bookshops this year. The RSC’s musical adaptation of The Boy in the Dress by David Walliams is a smash hit, and after a decade of Christmas Day BBC animations, Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler are a veritable festive tradition (this year it’s The Snail and the Whale). Meanwhile, Jack Thorne’s eagerly anticipated adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials debuted to rapturous reviews. In July, How to Train Your Dragon author Cressida Cowell became the new children’s laureate and is already proving to be a formidable advocate of literacy, pursuing with enormous energy her “laureate’s charter” to improve access to books and to make school libraries mandatory.
Finally, we bid farewell to two giants of children’s literature. John Burningham, who died in January, was a double Kate Greenaway medal winner, delighting readers from the 1960s onwards with the wit, warmth and imagination of works such as Borka and Mr Grumpy’s Outing. Judith Kerr’s debut, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018, beloved to generations of readers along with the Mog series and titles such as When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. She died in May, just a week after she was named illustrator of the year at the British book awards. Fiona Noble
The best picture books, chosen by Imogen Carter
Whether focusing on faraway places or far-out people, dangerous dinosaurs or polluting plastic, nonfiction picture books for the very young have flourished in recent years, and this year’s crop really had the wow factor.
Fausto Gilberti has managed to bottle the wild spirit of some of the world’s greatest artists in his cheekily titled biographical series comprising (to date) Jackson Pollock Splashed Paint and Wasn’t Sorry and Yves Klein Painted Everything Blue and Wasn’t Sorry (Phaidon). In each book, the Italian author and illustrator combines inky black and white with a single pop of colour (blue for Yves Klein, egg-yolk yellow for Pollock), while his bug-eyed, zany artists recall the Minions from Despicable Me but with art history degrees and sharp suits.
The books may end with an example of artwork and a more traditional biography but they’re not solely for art-loving children and families; they celebrate individuality and creative self-expression.
“Be proud of your mad ideas, kids!”, Gilberti seems to say, as he imagines Pollock splashing paint while doing somersaults or cycling. “When he painted,” Gilberti writes, “his heart would beat like a drum and he could not stay still.”
Picasso said: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up,” and Gilberti captures perfectly the elements from the creative lives of these adults that will really tickle children. We hear how Klein dressed as a knight for his wedding, once released 1,001 balloons into the sky, and gave his gallery guests blue drinks that “made their pee blue, too!”
Watch out for Yayoi Kusama Covered Everything in Dots and Wasn’t Sorry next year.
The subject matter may be very different, but the pages of Sabina Radeva’s On the Origin of Species (Puffin) also vibrate with life and feeling. Radeva trained as a molecular biologist before quitting to study illustration, and her acclaimed debut combines these two worlds. Her retelling of Darwin’s seminal study doesn’t shy away from the complexity of his research, often quoting him directly; but her beautiful drawings, which seem to crawl and canter out of the book’s spine, are so colourful and expressive that pre-schoolers as well as juniors should find it enriching.
Picture books about the climate crisis were everywhere this year, and while some struck the right tone (inspiring rather than panicking the very young) it was Oliver Jeffers’s exquisite fable The Fate of Fausto (Harper Collins), sparked by a visit to the wild north coast of Antrim, that felt like the greatest hymn to nature. Made using zesty colours and traditional lithographic printmaking techniques, it’s an essential buy for picture book lovers aged five to 85.
It was a year full of fantastic fiction. Sophie Dahl’s grandfather would have loved the adventurous girl at the heart of her debut children’s book, Madame Badobedah (Walker), while there was an air of the old man himself in Abi Elphinstone and Fiona Woodcock’s The Snow Dragon (Simon & Schuster). This extended picture book features a “word-mangling” seven-year-old called Phoebe, who longs to escape the orphanage of the Trunchbull-esque Griselda Bone. When her snowman transforms into a snow dragon that takes her on a Christmas Eve journey, it’s reminiscent of Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman.
Woodcock uses blown-ink to create snow-dusted, dreamlike images that give this sweet, uplifting tale a unique look.
Little hands that love opening letters will also enjoy two of the year’s wittiest interactive books. For fans of the bestselling The Day the Crayons Quit, Drew Daywalt’s The Crayons’ Christmas (pictures by Oliver Jeffers; Harper Collins) has festive mail from the crayons who have flown the nest (well, stationery cupboard), while Emma Yarlett’s vibrant Beast Feast (Walker) features RSVPs to a monster’s gruesome party. Like so many of this year’s best books, it will have children giggling with delight long after their Christmas dinner.
The best chapter books, chosen by Kitty Empire
Children’s fiction abounds with special powers and alternative worlds. Mutter an incantation, then, to magic away the top layer of bestselling children’s books at this time of year – the Walliamses, the Wimpy Kids and Dork Diaries, the Christmasaurus and David Baddiel. It will reveal a rather different terrain. This is a land less formulaic and more diverse than the bestseller lists, packed with dazzling inventiveness, expert storytellers and series with resonance.
You can’t really describe Katherine Rundell as a rising star any more, so fixed is she in the kid-lit firmament. Rundell flexed her historical thriller muscle in The Good Thieves (Bloomsbury), which pitted a young British girl and an unlikely alliance of streetwise youngsters and circus performers against New York gangsters and crooked politicians: justice was served with relish.
Relative newcomer Sophie Anderson segued seamlessly from her previous hit, The House With Chicken Legs, into another book inspired by Russian folk tales, The Girl Who Speaks Bear (Usborne), and remained at the forefront of the zeitgeist for frosty, Russia-themed books. Who you really are and where you really belong are evergreen themes she explores well.
Two more maestros of children’s fiction with moral compasses just as finely tuned remained surefire reads. Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s latest was Runaway Robot (Macmillan), a madcap escapade starring a boy and a delusional bot. Ross Welford’s The Dog Who Saved the World (HarperCollins), meanwhile, featured a canine plague, time travel and refreshing originality.
Rock solid is Eoin Colfer, whose long-awaited comeback, The Fowl Twins (HarperCollins), found the kid brothers of Artemis Fowl laying their own thrilling trail of destruction (they narrowly avoid sinking Amsterdam). In this universe of armed fairies and inquisitorial nuns, tech and magic are the same thing, but you are never more than a few paragraphs away from a belly laugh.
The doyenne of British children’s fiction, Jacqueline Wilson, never disappoints. We Are the Beaker Girls (Doubleday) was the second instalment in the new lives of the grownup Tracy Beaker and her daughter, Jess, a story about new beginnings and unexpected challenges.
If those names are familiar, more deserve to be. A continuing success this year was 2018’s The Boy at the Back of the Class (Hachette) by Onjali Q Raúf, which won the Waterstones children’s book prize. Raúf’s follow-up was The Star Outside My Window (Hachette), which tackled the aftermath of domestic violence with a shining innocence.
Authors from BME backgrounds should not have to write solely about society’s failings, however, so three cheers for Little Badman and the Invasion of the Killer Aunties (Puffin), by comedians Humza Arshad and Henry White and illustrated by Aleksei Bitskoff, and the vivid subcontinental adventure that was Asha and the Spirit Bird (Chicken House), the magic realist debut from Jasbinder Bilan.
One book really stayed with me long after I finished it, however. Newcomer Darren Simpson’s debut, Scavengers (Usborne), seems set in a different world with its own language and customs. But the reader’s realisation dawns – alongside that of Simpson’s protagonist, a youngster called Landfill – that Hinterland, the only home he knows, is not what it seems. Things are not exactly as he’s been told by Babagoo, his strict but affectionate protector, either, a cantankerous soul given to expletives such as “flaming brownberries!” The discovery of where puppies come from throws young Landfill for a loop. Parents, though, will smile at a “woofler” called Orwell and a “mowler” called Atwood.
Simpson skilfully avoids hammering any point home, but this emotive coming-of-age tale queries love and loyalty, our throwaway society, and what exactly it is that walls keep out and in. That’s a lot to pack into what is, at heart, a hard-to-put-down tale of tweenage derring-do.
The best poetry books, chosen by Kate Kellaway
In Poems to Fall in Love With (Macmillan), the former children’s laureate Chris Riddell lets loose: cupids cavort with hearts, roses and embracing couples. His drawings seem blown speedily across the pages as if by a spring breeze. But the pleasure and surprise is that the poems themselves are not light as candyfloss. This is a stupendously well-chosen, feelgood anthology in which even feel-bad poems feel good. The Emilys (Brontë and Dickinson), Auden, Keats and Yeats rub shoulders with – and sometimes shed tears alongside – contemporary writers and unfamiliar poems.
I was particularly touched and taken aback by novelist Neil Gaiman’s Wedding Thoughts: All I Know About Love, with its insights into not knowing; affected by the embattled sorrow of Jan Dean’s Tomorrow when you will not wake; and delighted by Grace Nichols’s Like a Flame, a poem of flaring passion. This little book is a must-have, with poems that make you feel more alive. As Wendy Cope concludes in The Orange:
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
Three collections about nature deserve a warm mention: Poems from a Green and Blue Planet (Hodder) is a generous anthology, discerningly edited by Sabrina Mahfouz with a magpie’s eye for sparkling gems new and old. I was thrilled to see William Blake’s Eternity included. It is the most exquisite poem Blake ever wrote (although I’m not precisely sure how the message about letting go relates to our planet’s future).
Moonstruck! (Otter-Barry) is a sweet sliver of a book (more new than full) with a gathering of accessible, unloony tunes. Celia Warren’s Poor Old Phoebe! empathises with a “trodden upon” moon that “still shines in poets lines” – and the book confirms this as poets marvel from a distance or are chummily familiar.
Joseph Coelho’s A Year of Nature Poems (Wide Eyed Editions) is a beguiling poetic calendar – meticulously written, sophisticated and novel. The best anthologies work beautifully precisely because they are not for children in any strict sense. Many of the poems were written for adults but have been judged understandable enough to be read by children. It is this unpatronising, flatteringly grown-up approach that cultivates, early on, a real feeling for poetry.
Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year (Macmillan) is a more questionable idea (do we want Shakespeare in soundbites?) but it is persuasively pulled off in this daily dose of soliloquies, sonnets and snippets from plays. The book is nicely edited by Allie Esiri (like its predecessors A Poem for Every Night of the Year and A Poem for Every Day of the Year) and what distinguishes it are its fascinating, scholarly prefaces (Professor Michael Dobson should take a bow). A lucky dip for all ages and a handsome Christmas diversion.
The Riddell family rules the poetic roost this year. The “tasty” poems in Midnight Feasts (Bloomsbury Education) have been chosen by AF Harrold and illustrated by Chris Riddell’s daughter Katy – a talented chip off the old block.
This moreish anthology – a menu of poetic snacks – is illustrated with beguiling, gentle humour. Christopher Reid’s Rabbit is a perfect example of the book’s charm. He maintains: “People who say the Rabbit has no song are wrong.” What rabbits celebrate is: “The Ballad of Salad”. Riddell’s rabbit has a priceless expression at the bottom right-hand side of the page – caught in the act – a lettuce leaf hanging from his mouth, helplessly involved in munching.
The best books for young adults, chosen by Fiona Noble
The Hate U Give made Angie Thomas one of the biggest names in young adult fiction. Her second novel, On the Come Up (Walker), is set in the same universe, charting 16-year-old Bri’s aspiring rap career. Thomas tackles gritty topics, among them prejudice, poverty and racism, but is such a smart, funny and perceptive writer that there is no sense of her being heavy-handed. Her relationships, both familial and otherwise, feel authentic and full of humanity.
Frances Hardinge is among the most original writers working today and Deeplight (Macmillan) one of her finest books yet. Here, her dazzling imagination has conjured the Myriad archipelago, a strange world of undersea gods, lush mythology and Lovecraftian submersibles. Two very human boys, orphans turned scavengers, make a dangerous discovery that drives a thrilling and unpredictable plot. She’s a writer who defies easy categorisation; this will entice older children and far beyond.
William Sutcliffe provides some much-needed comic relief in The Gifted, the Talented and Me (Bloomsbury), a deft satire on modern family life with shades of Adrian Mole. Happily average Sam moves to Hampstead with his newly rich family and finds himself utterly out of place at the North London Academy for the Gifted and Talented. More funny books for teenagers is high on my wishlist for 2020.
Next, three outstanding and very different debuts to look out for. Murder mysteries were the year’s big ticket in young adult fiction. Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (Electric Monkey), set in the English town of Little Kilton, follows a sixth-former studying a notorious local crime for a school project. Not as slick as its American counterparts, perhaps, but the snappy title, addictive plotting and small-town secrets made it the bestselling debut of the year.
Liz Hyder’s Bearmouth (Pushkin) is both bold and ambitious, written in an unusual first-person, phonetic dialect. The book takes place in the dark claustrophobia of Bearmouth mine, where workers are cowed by hard labour and religious indoctrination. In this nightmarish world, naive protagonist Newt is unsettled by a newcomer’s talk of “revolushun”. Hyder is a writer of considerable potential.
Another remarkable new voice is Akwaeke Emezi, already acclaimed for their (the personal pronoun Emezi prefers to use) adult novel Freshwater. Pet (Faber) is set in the American town of Lucille, in a world almost like ours. Here, the revolution has been and gone and with it a purging of evil and corruption. Or so it seems, until the day a creature of horns and claws emerges from a painting and tells 15-year-old Jam that he is there to hunt a monster. A timely, nuanced book about the monsters living in plain sight.
Finally, a winter classic to savour over the darkest days of the year. Susan Cooper’s famous The Dark Is Rising (Puffin), first published in the 1970s, has been reissued with a new introduction by Robert Macfarlane. On midwinter’s day, Will awakes to an ancient winter landscape and learns that he is one of the “Old Ones”, tasked with holding back the Dark at the potent time around the winter solstice.
In his introduction, Macfarlane recalls first reading the book as a teenager in the 1980s, gripped by fear of nuclear apocalypse. Today’s fears, he writes, may be different but “the dark is always rising and the work of the greatest stories is to hold it back”.
• To order any of these books for a special price, click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com
