The Little Car ¦ The Old Man Who Sneezed

Two welcome collections from experienced practitioners of the storytellers art. Leila Berg's gently domestic stories about The Little Car still sound fresh after a remarkable thirty years. Their timeless attraction lies in the clever balances between dialogue and action and in the fact that the grown-ups (always well-drawn by Ms Berg) support and contribute to the business of 'let's pretend'. Eleven separate episodes, just the right length for hometime or bedtime reading in a handsome edition with a lovely cover and pictures from Rose.

Dorothy Edwards' collection is a poignant reminder of the gifts of a writer who always served the nursery-infant age group well: she died recently. Like Leila Berg, her stories depict well the ordinary and the workaday, yet she had a particular talent for celebrating the fey (old lady dolls), the fantastic (invisible pigs), and the mysterious, even the near frightening (wicked birds and wild cherry trees). The title story is a clever cumulative joke. Little brothers and sisters usually fare well against the odds. Thirteen delightful stories - most of them previously published - but welcome in an imaginatively presented edition.