GRANDPARENTS ARE among my most assiduous and responsive correspondents, so I’m always looking out for good books featuring this special relationship between old and young. They are hard to come by. Although many parents are dependent on them to look after their children during the week, grandparents have little presence in children’s fiction.

The Victorians knew that they could be figures of real power and consequence. My favourite is the magical “great- great-grandmother” of Princess Irene in George Macdonald’s enchanting novels The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. At times as fragile as a cobweb, and at others a beautiful, terrifying giantess, she identifying age with weakness, ugliness and foolishness.

Sometimes, as in Anthony Horowitz’s black comedy Granny, or Meg Cabot’s The Princess Diaries, grandmothers are monstrous, selfish old bats, as sinister or selfish as any witch in a fairytale; for children bored by or estranged from the older generation these no doubt come as a relief. More often, however, grandparents tend to be like those in Roald Dahl’s The Witches or Lucy M. Boston’s glorious Green Knowe series: a mixture of toughness and tenderness, possessing the love of a parent without the fretfulness.

In Laurence Anholt’s Seven For a Secret, Ruby, aged 6, has no idea what her grandfather looks like. She begins a correspondence with her “grampa” one night when it’s noisy in the city, and she can’t sleep. He lives in the countryside, with only a dog and the magpies outside for company, and longs for his son, Ruby’s father, to come to live with him. He tells Ruby the old rhyme about magpies — “One for sorrow, two for joy .

. .” As their tender, innocent letters cross, a relationship develops. Each tells the other a secret. Ruby’s is that her mother is going to have another baby. Grampa’s is that he has “been hiding shiny things for a long time, just like the magpies”. He makes a magpie necklace for his granddaughter, and the birds come to symbolise the freedom that Ruby’s family yearns for.

Anholt’s bestselling Chimp and Zee books, and his dramatisations of the lives of Picasso, Degas and Monet, were outstanding in showing a child’s- eye view of family life and art, but this has a new depth.

Ruby’s parents are about to be evicted because they can't pay the rent. Grampa’s illness becomes acute, and Ruby knows when he dies because she is visited by a single magpie — one for sorrow. The two never meet, but the family moves into his house, and feels his benign presence. Eventually Ruby discovers the box that he hid for her in the magpies’ tree — full of gleaming treasure that will enable them to live happily ever after.

Jim Coplestone’s funny gentle watercolours (shown) match the text. Each character is strongly realised, as is the passing of time. The picture of Grampa dying in bed at dawn, holding Ruby’s letter to his heart while his dog and a trio of magpies look on is deeply affecting, as the next page shows Ruby's family welcoming the baby under the rising sun.

This is a book about bereavement as well as a fairytale with a happy ending. It is striking how often loss and mourning are best tackled in picture books rather than novels — Harry Horse’s classic, The Last Polar Bears, also features an intrepid grandfather, journeying to the North Pole, sending back letters to his grandchild in an extended metaphor for death. When grandparents play an important part in children’s lives, their loss is especially hard — the precious hours that they spend with their descendants can’t be celebrated enough.

WHAT'S MORE...

GRANDMOTHERS’STORIES (4+)
retold by Burleigh Muten
Barefoot Books, £12.99

Excellent fairytales.

WHEN GRANDMA CAME (2+)
by Jill Paton Walsh
Available second-hand

A travelling grandma’s love for her granddaughter.

THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN (9+)
by George MacDonald
Puffin, £4.99

Princess and her great-great- grandmother battle goblins.

NANA’S GARDEN (2+)
by Sophy Williams
Available second-hand

A boy plays with a ghostly girl in his grandmother's garden.

A BUSY DAY FOR A GOOD GRANDMOTHER (3+)
by Margaret Mahy
Available second-hand

Mrs Oberon will stop at nothing to help her son’s teething baby. Hilarious.

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist