As the media case against asylum seekers gathers pace and is reinforced by vote-catching politics, everyone - especially children - needs to know something much closer to the truth about why people leave their countries and what the reality is when they come here.
Anyone trying to understand the complexities of life as a refugee child would do well to turn first to the winner of this year's Bisto Book of the Year Award. Marilyn Taylor's Faraway Home (O'Brien, £4.99) is a tale of Jewish children who came to safety on the Kindertransport after the rise of Hitler. Like the refugee children of today's conflicts, they had to make new friends who understood little or nothing of what they had been through. Based on a true story, it tells how Karl and Rosa adapt to life on a farm set up by the local Jewish community just outside Belfast. Their survival depends on building new trust and keeping hope alive.
Beverley Naidoo's The Other Side of Truth (Puffin, £4.99) comes much more from the present day. It tells how Sade and her younger brother Femi see their mother shot dead on the doorstep in Nigeria, the victim of their father's political enemies. With no time to mourn her death, the children are smuggled out of the country. Arriving in London, they are abandoned by their hired courier and left to fend for themselves in a country that is alien in every respect.
Helped by foster parents and the refugee services but, above all, by the moral courage inculcated by their parents, the children cope outwardly. Inwardly, however, the emotional toll tells in Femi's retreat into silence.
Sade tells the story of the disintegration of her world, a grief that is compounded by the hostile reception from her fellow pupils, ignorant of the upheaval she has been though.
In The Girl in Red by Gaye Hicyilmaz (Orion, £4.99) the arrival of a group of Romanian gypsies is greeted with violent abuse by the residents of Poets' Rise. Strange alliances build up between previously warring neighbours as they unite against the newcomers. To Frankie's shock, his mother becomes leader of the bigots, forfeiting her new boyfriend in the process. Frankie sees the Romanians only through his obsession with Emilia, the beautiful girl with the long plaits in a red dress and sandals who arrives in his class speaking no English.
Comparing his love with the boundary-crossing of Romeo and Juliet, he takes sides against his mother and allies himself instead with other, more compassionate adults.
Gaye Hicyilmaz's adolescent Frankie observes and learns, moved by compassion for an individual that leads him to reject the prejudice that surrounds him. Frankie's view lingers and informs.
Like Sade and Femi, Kaninda in Bernard Ashley's Little Soldier (Orchard, £4.99), has seen his family killed. He arrives in England alone, only holding himself together by his secret plans to get back home. Kaninda has been a gun-toting boy-soldier fighting for the rebels in East Africa: he has the scar to show for it. On the estates around his new school in east London he finds tribal warfare of a different kind - less bloody, but every bit as pernicious. Taking sides with Laura, daughter of his adopting family, he is sucked into new friendships, ties that help him to begin a new life.
• Children's Book Award 2000 has been won by Michael Morpurgo for Kensuke's Kingdom (Mammoth, £4.99). It also won the shorter novel category. The longer novel winner was JK Rowling for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Bloomsbury, £4.99) while the picture book category was won by Nicholas Allen for Demon Teddy (Hutchinson, £9.99). The Children's Book Award is given annually by the Federation of Children's Book Groups and is chosen entirely by children.
