If you are a parent, you may remember Roald Dahl, Joan Aiken and Terry Pratchett; their heirs include Anthony Horowitz (Alex Rider, the Diamond Brothers series; Cressida Cowell (How to Train Your Dragon, the Wizards of Once series); and Philip Pullman’s books for younger children (The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, Clockwork, I Was a Rat!). But there are dozens of other brilliant writers to discover.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s stories make you laugh and cry. Whether writing about two bereaved brothers and their stash of illegal money (Millions), or the first 11-year-old to go into space (Cosmic) or a boy whose missing limb and rebellious attitude to authority is exactly what is needed to rescue a marvellous lost invention (Runaway Robot), he is the real deal for children of eight and over.
Kate Saunders won the Costa prize for her heartrending first world war sequel to E Nesbit’s classic Five Children and It, but her screwball comic novels (Beswitched, Magicalamity, The Belfry Witches) are inventive delights that mention bums and farts. The Great Reindeer Disaster and its sequel Trouble on Planet Christmas (for those aged seven and up) transport the hapless Trubshaw family from Earth to Planet Yule, where Father Christmas and his crew are in chaos thanks to a bad reindeer.
Phil Earle’s quarrelsome clans have hearts of gold, and are especially welcome seasonal reads for seven-year-olds stuck at homeseven-plus. Demolition Dad, The War Next Door, Superhero Street (in the Storey Street series) all combine laugh-aloud humour with vivid imagination and comforting warmth as his embattled protagonists struggle with familiar and unfamiliar problems such as discovering they have super-powers. If you like comedy without cruelty, he is your man.
Catherine Fisher is a poet best known for her mind-bending YA fantasies (The Snow-Walker’s Son, The Relic-Master, Incarceron) but her Clockwork Crow trilogy is an enthralling adventure for those aged eight -plus. Seren arrives in the dead of winter at a grand Welsh house whose owners are plunged into mourning for their lost son. The story of how Seren wins him back against supernatural forces with the help of a grumpy enchanted clockwork crow is funny, thrilling and exquisitely written.
Philip Reeve is familiar to many for his Mortal Engines series, but his Goblins series is gloriously entertaining, not least because he inverts all the tropes Tolkien made famous. Skarper is a goblin in a world where evil is rising, but it is a goblin, not just the Prince who is going to change matters, often by a series of misunderstandings and misadventures. The schoolboy humour is properly mischievous, and a goblin makes a stylish antihero for eight-year-olds.
Eva Ibbotson’s children’s books include not only her famous Journey to the River Sea but classics for seven-year-olds and above, such as Which Witch? (with its wickedness competition to see who gets to marry Arriman the Awful); Dial a Ghost (in which some good ghosts get mixed up by an agency and sent to haunt a little boy to death but become his friends) and Monster Mission (three aged guardians of endangered magical creatures kidnap three children to become their successors). Wildly original and wholly satisfying, her villains are snobbish, selfish and cruel and the good-hearted children who defeat them do so to peals of delighted laughter.
