0- to 4-years

Laura Hambleton’s board book Chameleon Races (Milet £4.99) features a stylish collage of blazingly vibrant, human-eyed lizards, from iguanas to Komodo dragons, racing each other on roller skates and bicycles. These are striking pictures that should appeal to the visually sophisticated.

A paperback picturebook to slip into the beach bag, The Boy on the Beach by Niki Daly (Bloomsbury £5.99) records, in rhythmic language like waves rolling in, how an adventurous boy temporarily loses his parents before all ends well. Its joyous watercolours are full of light and the sensuous pleasures of the seaside.

And to take on a picnic in the park: Oscar’s Half-Birthday by Bob Graham (Walker £10.99), a heart-warming urban tale starring baby Oscar and his three-year-old sister, full of community spirit and truthful detail, from the existence of graffiti to the way the sun shines through a baby’s ears “lighting them up like little lanterns”.

Jane Simmons infuses her textured washes with the warmth of summer nights in Ebb and Flo and The Sea Monster (Orchard Books £10.99), the fourth adventure of irresistible little Flo and her dog Ebb, an empathetic tale of the fears and delights of a child camping on a beach.

The roaringly well-designed picturebook Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs (Puffin £10.99) by Giles Andreae and Russell Ayto is a dream come true for readers (of 2-6) like Flinn who loves pirates, dinosaurs and mayhem. Flinn becomes the hero of his own adventure when the school stationery cupboard opens, like CS Lewis’s wardrobe, on to another world. Ayto’s crisp, angular caricatures, with their leaning perspectives and op-art patterns, make the action so vivid you can almost hear it.

5- to 8-years

When penfriends Ally and Nancy meet, they find they are Just Like Sisters (Simon & Schuster £10.99) and share girly activities. The joke of this clever picturebook for 4-6s, revealed by Sophie Fatus’s lively, confectionery-coloured pictures, but omitted from Angela McAllister’s text, is that Nancy is a small child, while Ally is an alligator. Difference is no barrier to bonding when making holiday friends.

Early reading books fun enough to justify the effort put in by beginners are hard to find; notable is the The Toad Prince by Rebecca Lisle (Andersen £3.99), a witty take on The Frog Prince, in which the princess can’t resist a suitor who eats worms and flies.

If you have ever taken reluctant children for a walk in the country, or to eat at an elegant restaurant, you should read the relevant stories in Horrid Henry and the Mega-Mean Time Machine (Dolphin £4.99); they will make you laugh out loud. Francesca Simon’s inventiveness ensures that the now vastly successful Horrid Henry formula does not tire; each of the four new episodes of Henry’s enjoyable awfulness and his brother Perfect Peter’s namby-pamby virtuousness is freshly funny.

Fans of Horrid Henry should also discover the under-recognised Tim Kennemore, one of our most astute and entertaining comic observers of modern family life. His latest is Alice’s Shooting Star (Andersen £4.99) about a middle daughter overshadowed by her siblings, and the glorious eccentricity of a small child’s imagination.

The sad life of Frida Kahlo, whose paintings are at Tate Modern until October, is introduced to children of 6-9 in Frida by Jonah Winter and Ana Juan (Frances Lincoln £10.99). The illustrations in this picturebook don’t try to copy Kahlo’s sometimes disturbing work, but offer a way into it by adopting its strange magical spirit and making bright, zinging images like Mexican folk art.

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