HOWZAT

Good read-aloud books are always excellent news on holiday. Vastly entertaining for any family with 6-11s is Kaye Umansky’s mock-Victorian The Silver Spoon of Solomon Snow (Puffin £4.99), which takes the familiar framework of a poor orphan boy seeking his true heritage and fills it with surprises and jokes. A crowning achievement in a career full of delightful books, this is huge fun and sure never to lose its audience.

Also using a familiar formula but bringing to it something extra is Val Rutt’s debut The Race for the Lost Keystone (Puffin £4.99), about an avaricious villain with a leather catsuit and a sinister laboratory who is thwarted by intrepid children and their eccentric great aunt. Rutt’s storytelling is stylish and compelling and her child characters refreshingly convincing.

The unmissable caricatures of Alan Snow scattered through A Turn in the Grave (Usborne £4.99), written by “Bowvayne”, make this one for children to read to themselves. A boy with a wicked stepmother (unlike his friends’ nice ones) enlists the help of the ghost of his favourite writer to take revenge on her. Full of dark humour and enjoyable made-up words, this is “delisherous”.

What Makes Me Me by Robert Winston (Dorling Kindersley £9.99) is an inventive and compulsive book full of facts about humans — from chemistry to character — with questions and quizzes inviting self-analysis. All the family can come back from holiday knowing themselves better.

11 plus

Sharon Creech is the queen of feelgood. Heartbeat (Bloomsbury £9.99) tells the story, in a series of exhilarating blank-verse poems, of a friendship between two children who love to run, one for the pleasure of it, and the other to win races. Full of joie de vivre, and dealing with big themes such as birth and death, love and growing up, it is a book to make readers appreciate life. So, too, is The Boy Who Ate Stars by Kochka, translated by Sarah Adams (Egmont £4.99), a remarkable, reflective book about a child’s friendship in Paris with a younger autistic child. Anyone from 9-90 can learn from its insights.

Legions of readers have taken Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series to their hearts, relishing its use of the sometimes brutal facts of life in ancient Rome. The previous seven books encompassed beheaded dogs, fire, the eruption of Vesuvius, slavery and persecution, but The Gladiators from Capua (Orion £7.99) is the most violent yet. Set during the Emperor Titus’s 100 days of games in the Coliseum, it shows how gladiators fought to the death and criminals were executed in the manner of Greek myths to inform and entertain the crowd — dropped 150ft from the top of the stadium, for instance, to die like Icarus. This book, in which the four mystery-solving friends narrowly escape death themselves, is not for the sensitive.

The diaries of Georgia Nicolson get funnier with every book, as Louise Rennison exploits her fans’ accumulated knowledge of Georgia’s wild idioms. In the fifth, “ . . And that’s when it fell off in my hand” (Collins £10.99), 15-year-old Georgia (a sweet person despite her obsession with snogs) has the Cosmic Horn for the new marvy and groovy Italian boy in town, but cultivates her snoggosity by practising with other boys. Readers will find themselves laughing uncontrollably until their sides hurt, and won’t be able to put the book down.

All books are available at Sunday Times Books First prices plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy

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