Smash hit

That’s How I See Things by Sirish Rao and Bhajju Shyam (Tara £10.99) has strikingly different illustrations by an Indian tribal artist. Elegantly produced, with composite animals made out of several creatures, it shows that books are where wonders are found, and inspires readers to make hybrids of their own.

Shirley Hughes’s Dogger won the public vote for the best Greenaway Medal-winning picturebook of the past 50 years, and her work is on Gordon Brown’s Christmas cards. Her preschooler Alfie may now be middle-aged, but, happily, he is still at nursery in a new adventure, Alfie and the Big Boys (Bodley Head £10.99), in which he earns the attention of a bigger boy he admires. Hughes invites young readers into a world they will recognise and love, and shows that toughness is not everything.

A happy match of author and illustrator is Astrid Lindgren with Lauren Child in a gorgeous edition of Pippi Longstocking (OUP £14.99): Child’s work is influenced by Scandinavian design and her own heroine Clarice Bean is indebted to Pippi. Ideal for making a new generation of 6-to 9-year-olds laugh at the antics of the strongest girl in the world (now modern and sly-eyed), it is energetically retranslated by Tina Nunally, although the word “turn-upstuffer” is now “thing-search-er”. Clearer, perhaps, but less fun.

From a more innocent era, Nicholas and the Gang (Phaidon £12.95) is the third volume of the narratives of a French Horrid Henry, written in the 1960s by René Goscinny, the author of Asterix, with witty cartoons by Jean-Jacques Sempé. A boy’s counterpart to My Naughty Little Sister, its irony is that the perpetrator doesn’t grasp the effect of his misbehaviour. A gem.

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The joyful Indian Tales (Barefoot Books £14.99) by Shenaaz Nanji and Christopher Corr collects stories from different regions, with information about each place and dazzling illustrations in colours as bright as Indian sunshine. And, for Christmas Day lulls, Everybody’s Activity Book by Pascale Estellon (Thames & Hudson £12.95) is a beautiful volume of simple, stylish ideas, involving first numbers, shapes and letters, with stickers and pages to cut and paste.

8-to 11-year-olds

Christmas is the time for beautiful new editions of classics. With evident delight, Shirley Hughes has reillustrated Peter Pan and Wendy (Hodder £12.99) using May Byron’s text based on the stage play – which is more accessible than JM Barrie’s novel. With her dark-haired Wendy, elfin, androgynous Peter and menacing Hook, Hughes reminds us how much black-and-white drawings can enhance a story.

Jan Piénkowski accompanies David Walser’s elegant retellings of stories from The Thousand Nights and One Night (Puffin £14.99) with detailed, curlicued silhouettes, against fiery, sumptuous, patterned backgrounds in a gift edition edged with gold. The images express, most decoratively, the stories’ sensuality and violence.

Robert Ingpen’s breathtaking autumnal illustrations to The Wind in the Willows (Templar £14.99) depict the characters as real animals and evoke the English countryside so convincingly that you can almost smell the river. Inga Moore brings soft, old-fashioned, pastoral sweetness and miniaturist detail to The Secret Garden (Walker £15.99). And fans of the film Beowulf can read the original (Templar £14.99) excitingly retold by Nicky Raven in a glowing edition with splendidly horrific Anglo-Saxon-influenced pictures by John Howe.

For lovers of nonfiction, Amazing Animals (Dorling Kindersley £6.99) collects riveting zoological data and arresting, sometimes scary photographs. It reveals, for instance, that flies taste with their feet. Titanic (Walker £16.99) by Martin Jenkins and Brian Sanders is the year’s best pop-up, with facts, facsimiles and, stunningly, the ship. And, as much pop art as pop-up, Ron van der Meer’s spectacular work of paper sculpture, How Many? (Doubleday £16.99), sets the surprisingly tricky task of counting its shapes. Marcia Williams, celebrated for comic-strip retellings of classics, tells the story of the first world war through the poignant scrapbook, with his own doodles, of a boy aged 10-15. Archie’s War (Walker £12.99) illuminates the idiom and domestic detail of the time, and uses letters home from the trenches and snippets of radio news.

Many of the year’s finest children’s novels have been historical. Perhaps the year’s best debut is FE Higgins’s The Black Book of Secrets (Macmillan £5.99), in which an influential stranger guards the dark secrets of villagers in a Dickensian setting; Mary Hoffman’s romantic murder mystery for 11+, The Falconer’s Knot (Bloomsbury £12.99), is set in Renaissance Italy, and Sally Gardner’s compelling marriage of magic and history, The Red Necklace(Orion £9.99), plunges us into the French revolution, as does The Tar Man (Simon & Schuster £12.99), the ingeniously plotted sequel to Linda Buckley-Archer’s Gideon the Cutpurse. The Tar Man not only goes back in time: it brings an 18th-century villain forward into ours, to electric effect. And Charlie Fletcher’s action-packed, insightful sequel to Stone Heart, Iron Hand (Hodder £10.99), for 9-14s, uses the coming-to-life of London statues to revisit history, from the middle ages to the first world war.

It has been a good year for sequels. Lauren St John’s Dolphin Song (Orion £9.99) moves the orphan heroine of The White Giraffe to an African desert island, where her losses are mitigated by her intense relationship with animals. Alex Rider saves the world for the seventh time in Anthony Horowitz’s Snakehead (Walker £12.99) and takes on traffickers in refugees and body parts. And – oh joy! – Hilary McKay has produced Forever Rose (Hodder £10.99), a final volume of the funny/sad Casson family series for 10-year-olds and above. It does what we hoped JK Rowling would do: it makes everything you wished for come true, including the unlikeliest of outcomes.

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