0- to 4-year-olds

Two new board books in the Amazing Baby series (Templar £8.99 each) are impressively well designed with shiny, feely patches and a brief and pleasant noise button. Early Days! combines photos and bold drawings to introduce shapes, colours and counting, and Rhyme Time! plays with nursery rhymes. These are great objects to hold, about 1ft square, with a cover cut out like a rainbow and big curved page tabs.

First books about animals usually have anthropomorphised images that don’t resemble actual creatures. In the companion volumes What We Do and Where We Live (Hutchinson £5.99 each) Reg Cartwright draws worms and moths with smiley faces, yet his friendly, chunky stylisation works. The simple text introduces babies and toddlers to a wider world.

Jan Ormerod’s wordless and tender Sunshine and Moonlight (Frances Lincoln £9.99 each) chronicle in panels like a strip cartoon the morning and evening of a pre-schooler. Youngsters can develop language skills by retelling the stories of burnt toast and fears of the dark themselves, and every reading can be different.

Any 2- to 6-year-old with a grandparent visiting this summer will have fun with Ben and Gran and the Whole, Wide, Wonderful World by Gillian Shields (Macmillan £9.99), illustrated with wit, style and clarity by Katharine McEwen. Ben and his Gran love each other best but they live far apart. Gran comes riding through forests, parachuting and skating across frozen lakes for a week to see Ben, while he makes preparations to welcome her. Grandparents who read this book aloud can make up their own account of their intrepid journeys.

5- to 7-year-olds

Suzanna Hubbard’s playful The Lady Who Lived in a Car (Chrysalis £9.99) was inspired by a newspaper cutting about a woman who inhabited her vehicle for years, but Hubbard imagines her as an eccentric with mad hats and a taste for hula-hooping. A larky contest with a local bigwig who wants her removed from the street ends with neighbourliness all round.

Summer is a great time for tomboys, with all that tree-climbing and outdoor sport. Encourage any 4- to 6-year-old tough cookies you know with the paperback of The Princess Knight by Cornelia Funke, translated from the German by Anthea Bell (The Chicken House £5.99). This is a satisfying variation on the usual fairy tale in which knights compete for the hand of a princess. Here the disguised princess, the best jouster of the lot, beats them all, and makes her own choices about her life. Kerstin Meyer’s casual, cartoony illustrations are expressive and comic.

Bee Willey’s intense, textured pictures for The Wooden Dragon (Cape £10.99) are blurred as if with drifting smoke, and layers of colour suggest three dimensions, out of which loom pale, dreamy faces. This all adds to the mystery of Joan Aiken’s resonant, strangely open-ended and posthumously published picturebook, a tale of the sadness of separation and the healing power of stories. A carved dragon left by a sailor as a gift for his sister comes to life and helps her overcome her sense of loss. The magic is a metaphor for hope. This will stand rereading not just for a summer but for a lifetime.

Allan Ahlberg’s Half a Pig (Walker £10.99), jauntily illustrated by his daughter Jessica, purports to be the story of a thief stealing a pig from his former wife in order to make the half he is entitled to into sausages. Really, though, it’s about reading (the story is told using specific words given at the beginning) and writing (children are encouraged at the end to create their own stories). It is also about weather and maps, and has illustrations that follow the action around the page. A rich learning experience for listeners and new readers of 5 to 7.

8- to 10-year-olds

Sometimes what children want in the long holidays is something different to do. Why not suggest dissecting a regurgitated owl pellet? Owl Puke by Jane Hammerslough (Workman £10.99) is a book in a package with, astonishingly, a real (heat-sterilised) fur-embedded pellet in every box, and is guaranteed to contain skeletal parts of at least one creature that the bird has eaten. Unsqueamish 8- to 12-year- olds of a scientific bent can learn a great deal about owls and “little-known puke facts” from this unflinching book, and can arrange minuscule bones in the specially supplied sorting tray.

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