Age 9-13

Former children's laureate Morpurgo often deploys in his fiction an older narrator who is looking back; he also favours a framing narrative which connects a real historical story to the present. Morpurgo has a gift for making young readers respond to his work emotionally: reading his stories typically provokes both grief and joy. All this might make his books sound formulaic, yet the particular historical events he selects make every volume distinctive, and each tale moves the reader so successfully that it would be curmudgeonly to object to any recurrence of form.

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea is an episodic story of the lives of a father and daughter. It embraces the sending of British orphans to Australia in the 1940s, a story of religious fanaticism in the outback, an idyllic interval with a loving mother-figure, a glancing account of the Vietnam war and a round-the-world solo sailing voyage, partly told through the e-mails of the young yachtswoman. Repeated motifs and a plot concerning a quest to find a lost sister knit together an engaging tale: Morpurgo does it again

(HarperCollins £12.99)

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