What would Christmas be without a few familiar faces? To adults and children alike, Judith Kerr needs no introduction. But there’s a new animal in the nonagenarian kid-lit superstar’s menagerie. Joining the tea-guzzling tiger and the dotty cat, Mog, is Charlie, a seal pup.
In Mister Cleghorn’s Seal (HarperCollins £12.99 hardback), Kerr’s first book in 37 years, Charlie is rescued from his rock after his mother is culled. Mr Cleghorn is the benign retiree who smuggles him in past his officious janitor; he enlists his neighbour, Miss Craig, in helping make a mixture of fish and milk. This is a gentle tale out of time that looks defeat in the face and wrangles a series of happy endings from it. (Kerr’s father, you discover, once kept a seal in similar circumstances, with a less happy denouement.)
National hero Sandi Toksvig – wit, QI host-elect and political-party starter – is less known for her children’s writing than she should be. Her latest book, in what smells like a series, follows the exploits of an Irish tomboy, Slim, whose small world is banjaxed by famine, revolutionary stirrings and emergency emigration.
A Slice of the Moon (Doubleday, £9.99 hardback) is a thumping great historical read, thick with complexity, aching with hunger; no punches are pulled in the grinding misery of the Atlantic crossing to outrun the unfair arm of the law. The family’s most treasured possession seems to be a printing press. But it’s actually Slim, who, undaunted, pulls her family through thick and thin.
Less familiar, perhaps, to UK readers is Shel Silverstein, author of Where the Sidewalk Ends, a classic North American children’s poetry book. His debut prose publication, Lafcadio, the Lion Who Shot Back (1963) (Pushkin, £12.99 hardback), is a gem now out here for the first time. Sick of being persecuted by hunters, the resourceful Lafcadio learns how to aim a rifle back at them.
Gradually, our feted hero develops airs and moves to the city, prompting great fun in Silverstein’s excellent line illustrations. But the leonine celeb’s identity crisis is inevitable: who is Lafcadio, really? And does he really want to go on a hunting trip?
Another heroic cat is the star of Catlantis (Pushkin, £12 hardback), a madcap and highly original adventure by Anna Starobinets, translated from the Russian, and starkly illustrated by Andrzej Klimowski. Quite how the cat puns work in Russian is beyond my ken, but this resourceful house moggy, named Baguette, is sent back in time to Catlantis, before the cat-astrophe, to rescue some flowers that give felines their nine lives (and their psychic powers), all to win the paw of his beloved Purriana.
This month also marks the 70th anniversary of the Finnish publication of Tove Jansson’s first-ever book, The Moomins and the Great Flood, now reproduced with Jansson’s amazingly atmospheric illustrations by Sort of Books (£9.99 hardback). We all know the story – Moominpappa’s gone missing, the family need to find a place to stay – but the publication date points up a shadowy allegorical near past for the debutant Jansson. Lost, zombie-ish people move about (the Hattifatteners), the menfolk are missing, everyone is just trying to keep warm and safe.
Warmth and safety recur in The Wolf Wilder (Bloomsbury, £12.99 hardback), another adventure set in Russia. Our heroine Feodora – Feo for short – rewilds pet wolves mistreated by Russia’s pampered rich. Parallels with the present are coincidental, because this is set in a Russia on the brink of revolution.
The local tsarist head honcho, General Rakov, is a deranged sadist who hates the feral independence of Feo and her mother, and resolves to destroy them and their pack. You never quite see the next thing coming in this utterly gripping non-fairytale, full of righteous anger, solidarity and lupine vengeance. Author Katherine Rundell wrote the excellent Rooftoppers a couple of years ago. This time, she excels herself.
