Smash hit

Holidays are a good time to catch up on classics, and the incantatory text of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book still rewards reading aloud. Nicola Bayley’s miniaturist pictures in her lovingly illustrated new edition (Walker £14.99) inject a pre-Disney reality into the appearance of the animals and India. This work of art will last far beyond the summer.

9- to 11-years

In the wake of Live 8, what could be more satisfying than the story of an ageing rock band reunited for a big gig? Especially as realised by Sam Llewellyn, whose The Return of Death Eric (Puffin £4.99) has the kind of knowing wit and cultural allusiveness that makes The Simpsons so funny. The sensible but ridiculously named children of a has-been heavy-metal star bully the wasted former wastrels he used to play with into re-forming. This is a smart, satirical, surprising read-aloud treat for all the family.

There comes an age when children like a bit of gloom. Wenny Has Wings by Janet Lee Carey (Faber £5.99) is the moving narrative of a boy who has lost his mischievous eight-year-old sister in a road accident; he, too, almost died, and his near-death experience reassures him that Wenny is happy in the here-after. This hope helps him mend as he chronicles his loss and his parents’ devastation, in a portrait of a family recounted in an impish voice that is full of life.

There is no beating the Short Books’s Who Was? series (£4.99 each) for intelligent, engaging narrative non-fiction for 10+ about famous people, from the emperor Nero to John Lennon. This might be the moment for Nelson (by Sam Llewellyn) and Napoleon (by Adrian Hadland) in the light of Trafalgar commemorations, but a particularly enjoyable gem is Gill Hornby’s gossipy and unstuffy Jane Austen: The Girl with the Magic Pen, an inspiration in both style and content for budding writers.

If you are travelling with children this summer to Greece, Italy, Spain, France, Ireland or America, it is worth taking books from Cadogan Guides’ engaging Pick Your Brains About . . . series (£4.99) for 8- to 12-year-olds, with their lively snippets of history and contemporary culture, useful foreign phrases, and plentiful monochrome drawings. Then let the youngsters be the guides and tell you about where you are.

12 plus

Terence Blacker’s sharp-witted and contemporary Boy2Girl (Macmillan £4.99) for 11+ relates what unpredictable things happen when a new American boy at an English secondary school passes himself off as a girl for a dare. Under the humorous surface it is thoughtful and revealing about identity and relationships.

In the sixth volume of 15-year-old Georgia Nicholson’s diaries, “ . . . then he ate my boy entrancers” (Collins £10.99) by Louise Rennison, Georgia goes to Hamburger-a-go-go land (America), a rich source of ludicrousness, and her romantic choices continue to be unresolved. The only snag about taking this on holiday is that it won’t last long: it will be consumed without a break except for the snorting noises. But it can always be passed on to parents by any youngster who can stand the sound of Vati’s and Mutti’s snorts, or dipped into repeatedly because every line is vair vair funny.

A lake in Sweden is the vivid setting for Summer with Mary Lou by Stefan Casta (Andersen £5.99), a tender rite-of-passage story about a 15-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl now in a wheelchair but once the darling of his heart. This is a candid, wise account of a boy’s emotional growth.

The popularity of Malorie Blackman’s raw, uncomfortable and original Noughts and Crosses trilogy (about a society where black people are privileged and white people the underclass) is proof that young adults are not fazed by brutality or passion. The concluding volume, Checkmate (Doubleday £12.99), is another emotional hard-hitter, the bluntly told and ingeniously constructed story of Callie Rose, the child of the first book’s ill-fated lovers, and victim of the sinister manipulations of her dangerous Uncle Jude. Again it is painfully near-the-knuckle about race, sex, politics and family relationships, but after much anger and despair, the trilogy ends with hope.

All available at Books First prices plus p&p on 0870 165 8585.

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