Prompted by the disturbing evidence on racism in our society that followed the Stephen Lawrence enquiry, Books for Keeps has produced a third edition of its invaluable guide to multicultural books.
"In our age of exile, migration, dispossession and global travel, our children cross borders every day, even if it is only from the safety of television screens or the pages of the books they read," says editor Rosemary Stones.
New categories include the excellent 16-plus list of fiction, biography and poetry, including authors such as Jackie Kay, Ben Okri and Hanif Kureishi, and a non-fiction section on Racism, Rights and Self-Esteem.
Multicultural publishing is changing constantly. In 1984, books were deemed multicultural for including a non-white child; now they stress cultural diversity. Among picture books, the heroine of Mary Hoffman's Amazing Grace (£14.99) wants to play Peter Pan in the school panto - to the consternation of her classmates. A black girl as Peter Pan? With encouragement from mother and grandmother, Grace gets the part - Caroline Binch's delightful illustrations show her playing Joan of Arc, Dick Whittington and Mowgli.
In Sarah Hayes's Eat Up, Gemma (£4.99), the little girl in a black family will do anything with her food except eat it, until her brother takes a hand. An increasing number of picture books show foreign settings such as Niki Daly's The Boy on the Beach (£9.99), a lively tale about a South African family outing with a post-apartheid air of freedom about it, or Caroline Pitcher's The Time of the Lion (£5.99) in which an east African village boy develops a close relationship with a lion.
Books like these give very young readers an awareness that there is a world outside their own where children live very different kinds of lives. The enormous number of beautifully illustrated retellings of myths and folk tales also offer an introduction to diverse cultural background.
In fiction, multiculturalism is developing more slowly. Non-white characters are rarely shown on book jackets (hence the delighted support given to Malorie Blackman's Pig-Heart Boy ages 10-12, £3.99 by many of the children "shadowing" the 1997 Carnegie Medal). Cameron, a black boy, will die without a transplant but the offer of a pig's heart from a pioneering doctor throws his family into turmoil.
And, while there are now novels with any number of different family backgrounds, such as Ann Strugnell's The Julian Stories (ages 5-8, £3.99) and Gene Kemp's The Hairy Hands (ages 10-12, £4.99), there are still few stories for any age group that reflect the multicultural realities made clear after the Stephen Lawrence enquiry.
As with picture books, the most exciting development in fiction is the dramatic increase in books with contemporary foreign settings such as Indonesian-occupied East Timor in James Watson's Justice of the Dagger (£4.99). Muyu, the son of a chief, and Lyana, the survivor of a massacre, endure nights of terror against a background of violence in this story for teenagers. Elizabeth Laird's Kiss the Dust (also for ages 12-16, £5.99) follows a Kurdish family forced to flee Iraq to Iran and then Britain.
• A Multicultural Guide to Children's Books 0-16+ , at £7.50, is available directly from Books for Keeps. Tel: 0181-852 4953. Fax: 0181-3187580. Email: booksforkeeps@btinternet.com
