Journeys, beaches, bedtimes, lie-ins and idle days at home all call for good children’s books. Summer holidays are the best opportunity to turn reluctant readers into committed ones, while bookworms must not be allowed to run out of material. Be prepared.

0-to 3-YEAR OLDS

Butterfly, Butterfly by Petr Horacek (Walker £9.99), an introduction to colours and insects, is one to read in the park or garden. It has a gorgeous silver cover and the inside recalls Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar. A little girl looking for a butterfly finds an array of garden insects, and cleverly placed holes in the pages invite readers to guess what comes next.

The activities of a boy and his dog at the seaside and in the country are celebrated in Ros Asquith’s rhyming text in Water Boy (Templar £10.99), with illustrations by Ian Andrew. The book is simple, lively and expressive of movement, fresh air and freedom. Farmyard Flyers by Mike Bostock (Egmont £5.99), meanwhile, is about a homemade aeroplane and a helpful pig whose dream comes true. Crisply stylised animals and bits of machinery make a fun, sunshiny read for 3-to 6-year-olds. Another bright farmyard tale for the same age group is That Pesky Dragon by Julie Sykes (Hodder £10.99), in which a destructive dragon turns out to be cute. The book is enriched by Melanie Williamson’s dynamic illustrations, with their strong, textured colours and comic caricatures.

4-to 7-YEAR OLDS

Saying the opposite of what you mean can provide hours of fun, especially if you’ve read The Opposite (Andersen £5.99), an off-beat paperback by Tom MacRae in which an odd and elongated “opposite” causes trouble. Elena Odrio-zola’s stylish illustrations have a striking comic quirkiness.

Eric Maddern’s rich and humane Nail Soup (Frances Lincoln £11.99) turns this traditional tale of a con trick into a romantic meeting of minds. Paul Hess’s illustrations, with their scrumptious colours, surprising perspectives and tempting details, make this rereadable book as satisfying as the recipe it describes.

White Owl, Barn Owl (Walker £10.99) is an example of how nonfiction picturebooks can be moving and lovely. Nicola Davies’s poetic text, interspersed with information about owls, tells of a grandfather and grandchild putting up a nesting box, and their eventual encounter with the white inhabitant and its chicks. Michael Foreman’s drawings are beautifully observed.

While most stories for 7-to 9-year-olds are cosy, Anne Fine’s are delightfully spiky. Ivan the Terrible (Egmont £4.99) is about a bilingual boy who is interpreting for Ivan, a new Russian classmate . Ivan is rude to and about everyone and his translator has to modify his utterances to protect the audience. Irreverent comedy ensues.

8-to 12-YEAR OLDS

Michael Rosen’s appointment as the new children’s laureate could well herald a renaissance for children’s poetry. An outstanding example of the genre is Carol Ann Duffy’s The Hat (Faber £9.99), a stimulating collection of wordplay for 7-to 10-year-olds. Note that poems work best if you let children read aloud to you.

In Jack Bolt and the Highwaymen’s Hideout by Richard Hamilton (Bloomsbury £5.99), 10-year-old Jack finds a doorway through time in his granny’s house. What follows is a colourful and light-hearted adventure for 7-to 10-year-olds in which Jack helps a gallant highwayman woo his lady love.

Written by Caroline Juskus and punctuated with doodles by Kate Leake and lots of codes, Minnie Piper’s diaries are ideal light reading for schoolgirls who like to collect scented gel pens and are just a bit interested in boys. The Ladybird Code (Stripes £4.99), about plans for a party, is breezy and engaging and suggests spin-off amusements, such as writing in Morse code.

Hurrah for Barnaby Grimes, the star of a beautifully produced new series for 10-year-olds to teenagers, by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. The first book, The Curse of the Night Wolf (Doubleday £8.99), is a spooky Victorian spoof with some vivid horror about werewolves, starring Barnaby, a dashing young messenger who runs errands across rooftops. It is a page-turning adventure, written with gusto and inventiveness.

Tunnels by Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams (Chicken House £6.99), originally self-published as The Highfield Mole, is already a bestseller thanks to stories about its discovery by Barry Cunningham, who “found” Harry Potter. It’s a good adventure yarn, about a 13-year-old boy who discovers an underworld ruled by a violent regime. But after 460 suspenseful pages it is frustratingly inconclusive. The sequel (and a film) will come.

Flora Segunda of Crackpot Hall by Ysabeau Wilce (Scholastic £6.99) is a fat fantasy of unusual originality for children of 10+, a sophisticated but chattily written evocation of a comprehensively imagined magical kingdom. Put-upon Flora, whose mother is a powerful general, encounters mysteries and has to prove herself in the run-up to her 14th birthday.

13+

Mary Hoffman’s The Falconer’s Knot (Bloomsbury £12.99) is part whodunnit, part romance, set in Renaissance Perugia and Assisi. Short episodes, compellingly told in fluent prose, neatly introduce the central characters (variously dashing, charming, selfish and sinister) whose stories revolve around a friary and its neighbouring convent. An ideal holiday read for children of 11+, especially if they’re heading for Italy.

Ally Kennen specialises in heroes of a criminal disposition. In Berserk (Scholastic £6.99), delinquent Chas corresponds, for a lark, with a prisoner on Death Row in America. The prisoner is released, comes to England while Chas is in a juvenile detention centre and pays court to Chas’s unstable mother. Our tests of character unfold, including a hair-raising episode at the top of a crane. This absolute nail-biter, written in a clever and convincing teenage vernacular, has an ending of stunning ingenuity.

For something more substantial, Beverley Naidoo’s Burn My Heart (Puffin £5.99) tells a shocking and shockingly unknown story about Kenya during the emergency in the 1950s when the murder of 32 white settlers led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of Mau Mau “suspects”. In plain, untricksy prose Naidoo writes a tale of two boys and betrayal that does indeed burn your heart.

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