Who can forget those long, lazy days of the summer holidays, luxuriating in a new book? Children today may look as if they are addicted to computer games, but given half a chance they will sprawl on the sofa or beach towel absorbed in an imaginary world. An exceptionally strong crop of holiday books has been released this summer.

Tired mothers of toddlers would do well to get Eric Carle’s picture-book Mister Seahorse (Puffin, £12.99; offer £10.39). It not only shows fathers taking care of babies, but also teaches children about the strange world of undersea creatures which carry their young in their mouths, on their backs or, like the sea-horse, in a kangaroo-like pouch. Carle, most famous for The Very Hungry Caterpillar, has an unfailing magic. (The video of this and other books can soothe the most anxious child under 6.) His gentle, glowing collages are satisfying for parent and child. You will learn about weird creatures called tilapias and kurtuses. And you’ll wonder why we were stupid enough to crawl out of the sea.

Maisy’s Treasure Hunt (Walker Books, £7.99; offer £6.79) is another rumbustious offering from Lucy Cousins that will have small fingers fiddling to find clues. It’s lively, colourful stuff, and the flaps are particularly witty, showing Maisie’s pirate ship with a mouse’s head on the flag, and unexpected things such as squirrels frightened by snakes and a wheeling night sky interspersed with bats and fireworks.

Another to add to your holiday treasure chest is The Seal Children (Frances Lincoln, £10.99; offer, £9.34), which is also centred on the sea and is illustrated by Jackie Morris. A poor fisherman falls in love with a seal-maiden or selkie. She returns to the sea after bearing him two children, but years later, when the village hears of the New World, she emerges to give her son a magic gift to pay for their passage. The lyrical paintings of sea and fantasy make this a haunting tale for children of 6-plus.

Often the best picture books need no text. This is the case with Belonging, by Jeannie Baker (Walker Books, £10.99; offer £9.34). Its remarkable textile collages show a poor family with a baby moving into an urban home with a bleak front yard. Gradually this changes, gets a lawn, then flowers as the girl settles into the community. By the end, the ugly urban grey has been completely transformed. It is the kind of book you finish with tears in your eyes, and may inspire bored children too old for Sarah Garland’s enchantingly funny and useful Eddie’s Garden (Frances Lincoln, £10.99; offer £9.34), also recommended for aspiring gardeners of 2-plus.

Primary-age children will love Heather Dyer’s The Fish in Room 11 (Chicken House, £8.99; offer £7.64), which is about a downtrodden orphan boy working in a seaside hotel who saves a family of mermaids and is, in turn, saved by them. Funny, tender and exciting, the story will appeal to boys of 6-plus as well as the girls who worship Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap (Dolphin, £4.99; offer £3.99). At the touch of water Emily grows into her inheritance from her mermaid father. Both mermaid tales are ideal for anyone taking a beach holiday or who feels like a fish out of water.

Cressida Cowell’s sequel to How to Train Your Dragon (Hodder, £5.99; offer £4.99) is How to Be a Pirate (£5.99; offer £4.99). It had my son reading for six hours without even thinking about his new computer game.

Katherine Langrish’s Troll Fell (Collins, £10.99; offer, £9.34) is inspired by robust Viking legend and is ideal for children of 7-plus.

Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan (Macmillan, £12.99; offer £10.39) takes readers to 19th-century Vienna. A foundling, Annika, is left some paste jewellery by an old dancer and is whisked away from her beloved foster-home to the rigours of life as an Austrian aristocrat. Only love, courage and the ingenuity of the Gypsy boy Zed can save her from snobbery and starvation. The book is packed with wit and adventure for the 10-plus reader.

Just as exciting for this age group, and more high-tech, are Eoin Colfer’s The Supernaturalist (Puffin, £12.99; offer £10.39) and Garth Nix’s Grim Tuesday (Collins, £6.99; offer £5.94). Colfer has temporarily abandoned Artemis Fowl, his teenaged criminal genius, for a dystopian thriller that reads like The Matrix crossed with Oliver Twist. Cosmo is in an orphanage for the “parentally challenged”, which means big business can test out anything from dangerous new vaccines to junk TV on the children. His near-death escape causes him to become a psychic “spotter” of Parasites, which suck the life-force out of the wounded. Nix’s hero, Arthur Penhaligon, almost dies of asthma and is caught up in a sinister parallel universe, with the Keys to the Kingdom (one for each day of the week) offering his only hope. Nix ’s imagination is matched only by his prose style.

If there is any boy over 8 who hasn’t yet discovered Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series, he should work his way through the teenaged spy’s adventures before Scorpia (Walker Books, £6.99; offer £5.94), his fifth and best.

For readers of 12-plus, Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now (Puffin £12.99; offer £10.39), Terri Paddock’s Come Clean (Collins Flamingo, £5.99; offer £4.99) and Catherine MacPhail’s Underworld (Bloomsbury £5.99; offer £4.99) are chilling tales that capture the strength and pain of being young. Rosoff’s is set in the near-future, in a Britain that topples into war as its heroine topples into love with her cousin Edmond. Paddock’s is based on an anti-drugs programme in which children are brainwashed and bullied by fanatics who control their lives.

In Underworld, the bullies are the children themselves, trapped underground on a school trip that goes horribly wrong. In each case, a supposedly therapeutic break from normal life turns into something more sinister, in which the protagonists are pursued by monstrous adults bent on making them conform. Since this is how many teenagers view eight weeks of summer holiday with their families, they might as well be prepared now.

• Amanda Craig’s novel Love in Idleness is published by Abacus (£6.99; offer £5.94)

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