Smash hit

The scene in which the turnip-headed Scarecrow discovers he’s too stupid to be anything but an officer is the funniest in any book published this year. Put this, and J. B. S. Haldane’s tales of life with a magician, My Friend Mr Leakey (Jane Nissen, £6.99; offer £5.94) in every bright child’s stocking: they’ll love it.

For those who prefer their stories to be rooted in reality, Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Millions (Macmillan, £5.99; offer £4.99) is a comic sparkler about two bereaved brothers who find a suitcase of stolen money, and spend it in touching and unexpected ways while pursued by crooks. Millions has been turned into a film, out next year, but the book is even better.

Martin Jenkins’s retelling of Swift, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver (Walker, £14.99; offer £11.99), is illustrated by the deliciously quirky Chris Riddell. The politically aware will enjoy seeing Tony Blair having his ear tweaked by doctors in Lagado, but this savagely entertaining picture book is for sophisticated kids only. Lynne Reid Banks’s Tiger, Tiger (Collins, £10.99; offer £8.79) is a gripping, heartfelt tale of twin tigers in Ancient Rome — one the pampered pet of a princess, one brutalised to be a killer in the Colosseum. How can they and their humans win freedom?

10+ AND TEENAGERS

Children of 10+ want books about teenagers. If there is one who has not yet discovered Anthony Horowitz’s stupendously exciting Alex Rider series, then there are four to buy before the latest, Scorpia (Walker, £5.99; offer £4.99), sweeps you off with the junior James Bond as he swims through a sewer in a Venetian canal, jump-dives onto a factory and saves every child in London.

Just as gripping is Terri Paddock’s thriller Come Clean (Collins, £5.99; offer £4.99), based on her family’s experience with an American anti-drugs cult. A harrowing and original thriller about personal choice and parental stupidity, it’s Catcher in the Rye for kids.

Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (Puffin, £10.99; offer £8.79) has already won prizes for its intense and startling prediction of Britain undergoing the Third World War — as seen through the eyes of Daisy, an angry American anorexic staying with her eccentric English cousins. Heartbreakingly romantic, it charts the moral growth of someone who begins as a spoilt city babe and ends as a genuine heroine. Tougher kids will prefer the climax to Darren Shan’s vampire series, Sons of Destiny (Collins, £4.99; offer £3.99), in which Darren faces his ultimate enemy in the journey from boy to Vampire Prince.

More subtle, if also compellingly creepy, is Joyce Carol Oates’s Freaky Green Eyes (HarperCollins, £5.99; offer £4.99), in which a girl whose family is dominated by her famous bullying father, finds the courage to break free.

Michael Lawrence’s trilogy, The Aldous Lexicon (Orchard, £5.99; offer £4.99), is a spine-tingling thriller about parallel worlds. In the first, A Crack in the Line, a bereaved teenaged boy, Alaric, steps into the way his world would be had his mother not died. The difference is, he’s a girl. In Small Eternities, Naia, his identical “twin”, finds out she’s not the only traveller. These are brilliant, thought-provoking novels for 12+ about grief, responsibility and choice.

Much jollier and featuring a terrifically fierce princess is Stuart Hill’s dazzlingly confident debut about power and personal discovery, The Cry of the Icemark (Chicken House, £12.99; offer £10.39).

PICK OF THE BUNCH

All of these books would make great gifts. However, if I had to choose three books above all, they would be Cressida Cowell’s How to Be a Pirate (7+, Hodder, £5.99; offer £4.99); Nancy Farmer’s Sea of Trolls (9+, Simon & Schuster, £12.99; offer £10.39); and Michelle Paver’s Wolf Brother (9+, Orion, £8.99; offer £7.64).

Coincidentally, the first two are about Vikings, whose brutal existence, give or take a few dragons, is depicted with vigour and wisdom as their respective heroes — nerd and bard — battle their way to safety. But it is Wolf Brother, the first of a seven-book series set in the deep dark forests of the Bronze Age, which my son read by torchlight under the duvet, and which my entire family listened to, spellbound for six hours. With its natural magic, struggle for survival and utterly adorable wolf-cub this is the one that will stay in the memory, long after other winter’s tales have gone.

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