It has been a remarkable year for children's books. In June, readers queued at midnight outside bookshops to buy J K Rowling's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a book that broke all records for speed and quantity of sales. A few months later, Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was longlisted for the Man Booker prize, and the chairman of the judges, John Carey, expressed dismay at its exclusion from the shortlist. In December, fans of Philip Pullman made the dramatisation of His Dark Materials at the National Theatre a sellout before opening night. Celebrities and distinguished writers, meanwhile, rushed to jump onto the children's books bandwagon. Peter Ackroyd and Jeanette Winterson turned their hands to children's literature, Madonna unleashed The English Roses and Mr Peabody's Apples, and the Duchess of York followed up Budgie the tiresome helicopter with the irritatingly twee Little Red.
AGES 0-5
But forget the celebs. There are plenty of other excellent books available for young readers this Christmas. One of the year's most likeable picturebook debuts for 2-5s, for instance, is Halibut Jackson by David Lucas (Andersen Press Ï10.99), whose hero is so shy he makes himself suits with which to blend into the background. When he receives an invitation from the Queen, though, he makes a mistake that teaches him that it doesn't hurt to be noticed. Young children can have great fun seeking him out in his decorative camouflage against beautiful, detailed, light-hearted street scenes and interiors.
For tiny children the idea of Christmas is hard to grasp. John Prater does a good job of providing one- to three-year-olds with a sense of what to expect in Is It Christmas? (Bodley Head £10.99). His tender, playful and skilfully drawn tale reflects most people's reality — receiving cards, decorating the tree, cleaning the house and welcoming guests — even though his protagonists are his trademark bears, and he indulges the perennial fantasy that it will snow.
The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Egmont £14.99), has been a classic for 3-6s for the past 10 years. A new, commemorative pop-up version makes the most of the technology with which the big bad pig destroys the wolves' houses (including dynamite, making for a dramatic pop-up explosion). The cycle of increasingly tough defences and destructive weapons is only broken when the little wolves build their house of flowers and make friends with the pig. Oxenbury's humour and draughtsmanship also grace an elegant volume of nursery rhymes and tales, The Helen Oxenbury Nursery Collection (Egmont £12.99), which would make a fine gift for christenings or Christmas for any child under five.
One of the most stylish picturebooks for 5+ is Neil Gaiman's atmospheric The Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by Dave McKean (Bloomsbury £12.99), which will frighten children and then make them laugh, thereby helping them to overcome their fear. It is a strange, cathartic, visually original book about a scary prediction that comes true, and is classy and cool.
Books that invite children to hunt out details in the pictures are always a great lesson in looking, and the following trio for 4-8s stands out. Valorie Fisher's Ellsworth's Extraordinary Electric Ears (Simon & Schuster £9.99) is an amazing alliterative alphabetic anthology in which each image inspires inventive imitation. David Ellwand's Cinderlily (Walker £12.99) follows up his bestselling Fairie-ality with a retelling of Cinderella, illustrated as a pantomime with real and surprisingly characterful flowers, while Sally Gardner's decorative and fertile Fairy Shopping (Orion £9.99) appeals, with its profuse and dainty drawings, to those children who love a catalogue. The King of Capri by Jeanette Winterson (Bloomsbury £10.99) proves that it takes a good writer to write a good picturebook. Winterson has produced a language-loving fable about greed and selflessness, love and equality, while Jane Ray has added a new element of collage to the rich colours and fairy-tale magic of her illustrations.
AGES 6-9
Christmas is a good time for traditional retellings. Among the most striking of the recent crop for 5-8s is Adèle Geras's emotive and literate reworking of Sleeping Beauty (Scholastic £14.99), spectacularly illustrated with Christian Birmingham's light-filled, romantic pastels and shaded drawings, which give new energy to an old tale. Meanwhile, Geraldine McCaughrean, the doyenne of classic retellings as well as an exceptionally skilled novelist, has The Oxford Treasury of Fairy Tales (OUP £20). Sophy Williams's soft, sumptuous and tactile pastels are slightly at odds with the bold scarlet cover, but the volume is handsome enough to occupy the imagination for a lifetime.
Sharon Creech, whose Ruby Holler won last year's Carnegie Medal, has a new book for 7-10s. Granny Torrelli Makes Soup (Bloomsbury £9.99) records the kitchen conversations of an 11-year-old girl and her Italian grandmother, whose wisdom sorts out issues of rivalry in friendship. Creech packs a lot of emotion into a few lines. Expect a lump in your throat by page 30.
The most enjoyable non-fiction of the year for readers of nine and over has been Peter Ackroyd's two scientific narratives, the first volumes of a series of eight Voyages through Time (Dorling Kindersley £14.99 each). The Beginning, exploring the mind-blowing origins of the universe, and Escape from Earth, about the space race, both demonstrate how gripping facts can be when expounded not in snippets but in continuous prose.
And any 8- to 11-year-old anticipating a bad time over Christmas with grim relatives will feel nothing but glee at the cynicism of Anne Fine's The More the Merrier (Doubleday £10.99), in which ungrateful house guests and selfish grannies get told terrible home truths as all the fake bonhomie of the season crumbles in the face of one unfortunate revelation after another. This is one to chortle over quietly in the corner while everyone around you keeps up a facade of Christmas spirit, and a refreshing antidote to the usual diet of seasonal sentimentality.
AGES 10-12
