Author of the month
Anthony Browne, The Shape Game
(Doubleday, £10.99)

There are no monkeys in Anthony Browne's new picture book. It's crammed with jokes, but he hasn't slipped in one banana skin. "I have written," he says, sitting chimp-like, long arms draped over his knees, and looking remarkably young for his 57 years, "far more books about people than books about monkeys, but the ones people buy tend to be about gorillas." He sighs, and fidgeting, pulls a trouser leg up to reveal just the kind of brilliantly striped socks his characters wear.

So the new book's not a departure then, but a release, maybe, for the man who often draws his characters inside boxes, and who tells me he likes painting gorillas "because it's as though there's a human being inside, looking out at you."

Apes have always taken over Browne's best loved works such as the Willy series, Gorilla and Zoo. One of his stories, Voices in the Park, only became real to him, he tells me, when he reworked the original drawings of people as assorted chimpanzees, baboons and orang-utans. Well, sorry monkeys, but people, our time has come: Browne, who has already scooped every award in the book - The Kate Greenaway (twice), the Kurt Maschler (thrice) and the Hans Christian Andersen - has produced another gem, only this time the starring anthropoids are all human.

The lightly etched story behind The Shape Game is that universal trauma - finding an outing to suit everyone. The bored, resisting family begin the book in shades of green and grey, but move into colour as the day works out, as these kinds of days sometimes do, for no particular reason.

Along the way, Browne - characteristically - covers some ground remarkably unsuitable for the picture-book age. The central, intricate drawing is of a deeply misogynistic Victorian picture hanging in Tate Britain, replete with images of a guilty mother and a breaking home. Why that one, of all the paintings? "It was," says Browne, "the one children asked me about the most while I was writer-in-residence at the gallery."

But dark feelings lurk in all his work. Gorilla, for example, is a bleak story of a girl trying to make sense of her father's emotional distance. Detached fathers - gorilla-suited or not - recur in his books. Even his tribute text to his father, My Dad, pictures a man with deadened eyes, and the father's feats are unoriginal.

Why do men get such a hard time in his work? His own father, a publican who drew lots of pictures for his two sons, was a loving dad. But he died when Browne was 17, suffering a heart attack in the living room as his two sons came in, Anthony brimming with the news that he'd just made the rugby team. "I've heard people say that you're angry with the parent who dies too soon," says Browne. "I don't remember feeling angry, but maybe that's how it's come out - that I show cold fathers. Which is the opposite of what mine was, actually." The father in The Shape Game, however, is easy and funny, though it is the mother who unlocks the paintings, and she is the one who is first painted in full colour.

Browne's professional life began with him working as a medical artist. It was a career the 19-year-old chose partly out of fascination with bodies - the painters he admired were Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali - and partly, he says, his adolescent involvement with death.

"Using a camera, all you'd get is a mess - you couldn't really see what was the vein, what was the artery, what was the liver even; it just looked like blood everywhere, hands and instruments pulling the flesh back. My brief was to produce a clear series of drawings showing the sequence of events."

He realised he was in the wrong job when stuff started happening on his sketch pad: "little creatures were creeping into the tissue". He still does this - even the backs of trouser legs look like they'll speak any moment in a Browne picture-book.

Despite, or because of, the amount of detail Browne packs into his pictures - he pays tribute to other artists (although since being sued by the Magritte estate, these days he only uses works out of copyright), and hides little jokes on every page - his books work for small children, even as they allow older siblings to recognise feelings like grief and desertion.

Browne's style is as distinctive as it is recognisable. When my baby son Elon first saw the cover of The Shape Game, he said: "Dad, Dad" repeatedly until we understood what he meant. His sister realised, and produced a favourite board book - Anthony Browne's "My Dad".

The figure on the cover of The Shape Game bears little resemblance to My Dad - this wasn't a Thomas or even a Bob moment, recognition of crudely drawn figures with egg-shaped faces. But Browne's imprint is such that a child not yet two years old was able to make the link. In fact, connections are characteristic of Browne's work. You look at his pictures - whatever age you are - and find references in them beyond the immediate text. His is a most evolved form of storytelling.
Dina Rabinovitch

· The Shape Game can be ordered p&p-free from the Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979, as can all the books in this article.

Kids' classics
The Eloise series, by Kay Thompson, illus Hilary Knight
(Simon & Schuster, £12.99)

The essence of Eloise as a character is an adult's cosmopolitan sophistication combined with the almost unopposed willfulness of a six-year-old. She lives at the Plaza Hotel in New York with her British nanny, a Pekingese named Weenie, a turtle named Skipperdee who wears trainers, and taped-together dolls to whom she has caused horrible "accidents" to happen.

She spends her days calling room service, torturing her occasional tutor, invading hotel events such as weddings, and generally doing her best to drive the staff crazy. Her mother is very rich, knows the manager, and is never around. Her father is never mentioned.

If this reminds you of anyone you know, it probably isn't a child. She's obviously a gay man. I suspect that Kay Thompson, a nightclub singer, would agree. The books came about because she camply entertained her friends by telling them about her life in this pseudo-child's voice, and someone had the bright idea of getting her together with illustrator Hilary Knight, another theatrical New Yorker, to make a book out of it.

The Eloise books would be almost nothing without the pictures. It is in the gap between the text and what is shown that much of the humour resides - the pictures give the lie to Eloise's boastful but not exactly realistic views. The sharp, witty, gorgeous pen-and-ink drawings also capture socialites in stoles, fawning toadies, Russian street-sweepers, the mess in Eloise's room, Nanny's working-class enthusiasms and the pug's bounding delight.

A child will spend hours deciphering Eloise's elaborately depicted trail along the stairs and lifts and studying exotic details - diplomats in turbans and saris at some function Eloise invades, ladies in hats with net veils. They probably find the sophistication of the pictures more accessible than that of the text, full of jokes like "Sometimes my mother goes to Virginia with her lawyer."

Eloise in Moscow is in print for the first time in 30 years, and it is a perfectly preserved period piece, full of spies and bad food. But, like Eloise in Paris, it's a travelogue. What one asks of sequels is impossible - more of the same, only different - and few equal their originals. (Do any of the Narnia books live up to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?) The Eloise sequels are formulaic, too.

To me, as an adult, the books read as works for adults. This also seems true of Dr Seuss and Winnie the Pooh - which does not mean they're not of interest to children. I was given Eloise when I was six and was both mystified and mad to go to the Plaza (staid in those days - not the Eloise theme park that it has become). I'll confess I even followed Eloise's lead at my grandmother's apartment and poured water down the mail chute.
Anna Shapiro

New
Follow me Down, Julie Hearn
(OUP £9.99).
Ages 13-16

The male teenage hero of this novel must contend with both his mother's encroaching breast cancer and his own adventures as a time traveller in the 18th century. The past is both an escape for him, and, like his mother's illness, a further challenge to his developing masculinity. This book is gripping, gentle, funny and downright scary at times. It also captures brilliantly the gulf between children's concerns, and what their parents think is on their minds.

The Thief Lord, Cornelia Funke, read by Michael Maloney
(BBC Cover to Cover, £19.99).
Ages 9-14

There's nothing like a summer spent driving assorted ages along a coastal path to sort out which books on tape and CD. Eleven hours on the road, a baby lulled into deepest sleep by the changing narrative rhythms, and older children prepared to spend the night in the car to listen until the end. Cornelia Funke is Germany's best-loved children's author. The Thief Lord is a children-in-peril classic, and works brilliantly on tape, drawing you in to narrow Venetian streets so effectively you're surprised to see English countryside out of your car window.

Ruby in the Smoke, Philip Pullman, read by Anton Lesser
(BBC Cover to Cover, £29.99).
Ages 9-14

This is the first of three novels about Sally Lockhart: Pullman's first, and lesser-known trilogy. Sally is 16 as the story launches straight into Pullman territory with a heroine with the means to kill, foreshadowing what is to come. Another of his favourite themes, opium and its ills, is the background to this Dickensian tale with twists, turns and dark alleys for every corner of the London it covers. Ruby is the shortest of the three books, but lasts a satisfying six hours and 35 minutes.
DR