Books for Giving 2024
It’s always a pleasure and a challenge to compile the annual Books for Keeps Christmas Gift Guide but this year the pressure to choose books that will be enjoyed not just on Christmas morning but throughout the year feels particularly intense. Our focus is on reading for pleasure, and we were sent several sleigh-loads of new books to choose from. Find out what passed the elf test!
Christmas picture books
There are fewer penguins jostling for space on the festive picturebook shelves this year, with the notable exception of Jonty Gentoo, the new collaboration from Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. The story of a penguin who makes his way from a zoo to the South Pole – via the North Pole first in error – it’s a proper adventure story and a wonderful tour of the globe. We meet animals galore, from bearded seals to polar bears and terns, all given character and depicted with real detail in Axel Scheffler’s illustrations; Julia Donaldson’s text is a treat to read aloud, the scansion and rhyme impeccable.
Our next three picture book choices each feature Santa, though he’s relegated to supporting role 
in Joseph Coelho’s and Farah Shah’s heartwarming story The Christmas Tree Mouse. Who knew until now that our Christmas trees harbour Christmas Tree Critters, there to help Santa on his busiest night of the year, cleaning up after he’s been (footprints, crumbs, reindeer poo), and checking that all the presents are in order. A mix up with the gift left for baby Ola nearly results in a Christmas catastrophe, but Christmas Tree Mouse is able to put things right and avoid another type of cat-astrophe too. In 32 pages, Coelho establishes this little character with her bauble hat and Santa HQ tablet as an essential figure in the Santa story, and it’s good to read a book which mentions balconies more often than chimneys too. Santa is present on every page of Mr Santa by Jarvis, a silent though very expressive figure, as a little girl asks him the questions we all want answered, as well as many special to her (‘Can you eat clouds? Do you stop at traffic lights?’). A palette of yellows and greeny-blues and smudged artwork give this both a cosiness and a dreamlike quality and, ‘Was it really real?’ asks the little girl on the final page. It’s up to readers to decide. The author of One Snowy Christmas Eve, Marc Bratcher, has cerebral palsy and his Santa origin story places Father Christmas in a wheelchair. The rhymes creak a little, but the story more than holds our attention and Korky Paul’s illustrations are full of life and energy, hours of fun to be had examining these snowy scenes.
The Carousel Horse by the much-missed Tony Mitton, illustrated by Penny Neville-Lee graces this issue’s cover. A magical adventure it covers even more ground than Jonty the gentoo penguin as a Carousel Horse is freed from the carousel to soar up to the moon and all through our blue and green world, returning to take up her duties again as she realises, ‘We all need a purpose. We all need a use./ I cannot be always so free and so loose.’ The verse is perfect here and the illustrations, particularly the moonlit scenes, are full of atmosphere.
Emily Sutton’s illustrations for Jonathan Freedland’s retelling of Ulrich Alexander Boschwitz’s unpublished story King Winter’s Birthday are very handsome, trees, landscapes, King Winter and his siblings, and interior scenes all worth poring over. It’s a fairytale story but the outside world has never seemed more real than in these pages. Title and cover make this perfect for the season but it’s a story to explore all year round with a moral to take to heart too.
Story Collections
Winter is a time for sharing stories and Sandra Dieckmann’s new illustrated version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales is well worth adding to any 
collection. Dieckmann grew to love these stories as a child in Germany and her retellings of favourites such as Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin have a pace and lightness that makes them feel very fresh. There are stories that will be new to readers in the UK too, told with similar momentum and sparkle. There are striking colour illustrations throughout, also by Dieckmann, full pages, vignettes and delicate borders. Theresa Breslin’s An Illustrated Treasury of Dragon Tales, is equally handsome, containing ten tales of dragons from across the world. This is a wonderfully varied collection with water dragons, feathered serpents, even a seven-headed fire-breathing dragon and, equally enthralling, some sharp young women to stand up to them too. Theresa Breslin is an accomplished storyteller and Kate Leiper’s illustrations catch the changing mood of the tales perfectly. Back to Emily Sutton now, whose colourful kings, queens, nobles and peasants stride, dance and gaze out from the pages of Shakespeare’s Plays, the first-ever illustrated children’s edition of the First Folio. Yes, technically this isn’t a story collection, but it demands to be read aloud, preferably by a group as Michael Rosen makes clear in his (verse) introduction. Abridged with care and sensitivity by Anjna Chouhan, these shortened versions tell the whole story of each play.
James Mayhew’s A Symphony of Stories is highlighted elsewhere in this issue and is another book to treasure. A collection of stories inspired by pieces of music, and filled with colourful papercut, collage illustrations, it is indeed ‘a concert for the eyes, the ears and the imagination’.
Ghost stories
Ghosts, spooks and things that go bump in the night make welcome Christmas visitors too. In Beanie the Bansheenie, Eoin Colfer and Steve McCarthy take the legend of the Banshee, those terrifying supernatural harbingers of doom, and create a story of friendship and family. Beanie, a young Banshee, is knocked loose from her pod under the bridge at the very moment she should be bonding with her human, a girl called Rose, and therefore is unable to see the CLOUD OF DOOM that will presage Rose’s death. As she gets to know Rose, she becomes very attached to this human, and when a flood threatens Rose’s family, Beanie manages to save them all. It’s testament to Colfer’s storytelling ability that the story glides so smoothly from something quite macabre, to a story that is a genuine and convincing celebration of love. McCarthy’s swirling green and black illustrations give this an otherworldly feel.
New from Lucy Strange and Pam Smy Lockett and Wilde’s Dreadfully Haunting Mysteries, The Ghosts of the Manor combines ghostly goings on with a crime story and highly entertaining it is too. Matilda Lockett is used to playing the ghost of ‘Poor Dead Edna’ in her aunt’s spiritualist stage show, but she can see real ghosts too. When her aunt is called to help banish a spirit that’s interfering with a search for lost treasure in an old manor house, Matilda quickly forms a friendship with a boy called Edgar, despite the fact he died years ago. Together the two find the missing jewel and solve a crime. Spooky, funny, splendidly illustrated cosy crime, this is set to be a real favourite and there are more stories to come.
There are ghosts and more in Claire Fayers’ Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins in tales that take old folktales and legends as starting points for something new. A mix of the uncanny, the unsettling, the funny, with a strong sense of place, these are a good length for bedtime reading and may well prompt story writing in readers too as the author hopes. Also available in giftable hardback is a 70th anniversary of one of the best ghost stories for the young, Lucy M. Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe.
Not a ghost story but certainly haunting, is The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, written by Frances Hardinge and illustrated by Emily Gravett. Somewhere in a dystopian future mankind is cowering behind the remains of a wall, built, possibly, to keep something out and now the last bulwark against the Forest, a wave of green that seems determined to wipe out those humans that are left. Forced from the relative safety of a crumbling tower after making a terrible mistake, Feather has to follow the wall to its very end. Dark but never gloomy, and terrifying though the Forest is, Feather’s story is one of human resilience and ingenuity and offers real hope for the future.
Books to slip in a stocking
One Wise Sheep by Ulrich Hub, colour illustrations by Jörg Mühle is worth tracking down, a retelling of the nativity story from the point of 
view of the sheep, it’s quirky, original, often very silly but still a surprisingly tender and moving sort-of description of the events of that night. Very different, but also quirky, original and funny is Sprouts by Sibéal Pounder. The story opens on an island inhabited by witches, where Christmas comes but once a year, as opposed to the outside world where it’s now Christmas every day. Good or bad? Young witch Gryla is convinced this is a bad thing, but she might just change her mind especially when she pairs up with Santa’s daughter, Merrilee Claus. Lots of fun and with not one but two very sparky protagonists. Nobody writes about animals or about war like Michael Morpurgo, and his new story Cobweb, starring a Pembrokeshire corgi during the time of the Napoleonic wars, combines both elements skilfully as ever, in an adventure full of bravery, excitement and true friendship, more Morpurgo hallmarks.
And finally, two books by authors no longer with us but who brought readers vast amounts of pleasure. Kate Saunders’ last book, A Drop of Golden Sun follows a group of child actors and their guardians as they work on a film inspired by The Sound of Music. It’s a life-changing experience for all of them but particularly quiet Jenny and her mum, the pair transformed by three months in the south of France sunshine. This is a book as much about the grown-ups as the child characters, but always from the point of view of its young audience.
Jeremy Strong died of cancer earlier this year and Fox Goes North is his last book, a fitting celebration of the power of art, of kindness and compassion, and the right way to say goodbye. It stars an assorted band of animals setting out on a quest to see the Northern Lights. As their caravan rumbles on, we gradually realise that one of them, Fox, won’t be making the return journey. A note from the author says that he was proud of the book; so he should have been.
Use our Books of the Year features and review section when you go Christmas shopping too and find our full Christmas booklist here.
