Hundredth-Issue Hardbacks

Stephanie Nettell’s selection of new publications which have caught her eye.

Some books make your heart sing. It’s a creative energy, I think, a zest for language, for living, for humanity. They don’t have to be particularly worthy (and they are never, ever, solemn), but they always leave you feeling richer.

Even the simplest can do it. Who would expect to be enchanted by another monster pop-up? Paul Stickland’s Swamp Stomp! (Ragged Bears, 1 85714 106 7, £9.99) has only seven spreads, but all are knock-outs, with startling but jolly dinosaurs – especially a lovely gormless green chap with his mouth full of grass – being lured to a riotous party by one line of rhythmic text. An old idea fizzing with new life.

Others are quieter, but the premise is the same: the most familiar concept can sparkle in the hands of a craftsman. I thought Cowboy Jess (Orion, 1 85881 227 5, £8.99, illustrated by Lizzie Sanders) was going to be a tongue-in-cheek parody of Western clichés, but Geraldine McCaughrean’s short class-reader has such warmth and gentle suspense that we’re purring with satisfaction when her foundling baby matures into a modest young hero who wins his Indian maid and saves her tribal lands from the railroad. Classic ingredients and skilled, straight telling give a book intended for an unsophisticated audience a universal appeal.

This is also true of two marvellously evocative stories of the English countryside. Gene Kemp’s fictionalised memories of her family’s introduction to life in a high Devon valley, like Paul Howard’s soft drawings, are full of movement and humour. Dog’s Journey (Collins, 0 00 675137 7, £3.50) is a ‘A Goosey Farm Story’, which suggests more to come: Kemp has set herself a daunting benchmark, for through this cheerily told story of everyday country life, of school and picnics, puppies and snowfalls, she recalls some strong, truthful emotions, like grief and anger, friendship and young love. Our Field (Collins, 0 00 185510 7, £8.99), also centred on the love of a dog, is a beautifully produced picture-storybook, a perfect team job between Berlie Doherty, adapting a nineteenth-century story, Robin Bell Corfield, whose pencil and water-colour paintings have the freedom and sweetness of an idyllic long-lost summer, and their publishers. A one-plot tale of how poor children, by good fortune bordering on magic, manage to keep their golden stray, it leaves behind it perfect contentment.

Night-time is a common theme in picture books, but Christopher Brook, a fresh talent with a lively imagination and a fondness for excitingly angled viewpoints, banishes the weary old monsters and replaces them with real-life creatures pottering about their business. In Monsters in the Garden (Andersen, 0 86264 577 8, £8.99), a small boy and his Gran search for ginger tom Caruso through the gathering dark, finding nothing to fear until an unnerving shriek – and an ingenious piece of fold-out perspective – locates a lovesick Caruso on the roof. Helen Cooper is a long-standing success, but The Baby Who Wouldn’t Go to Bed (Doubleday, 0 385 407939, £9.99) is wonderful even by her standards. As the Baby pig-headedly sets off into his own night adventure, text and pictures are inventively surreal, funny and loving, with a perfectly judged almost-scary climax and a snuggly conclusion that doesn’t quite banish the Baby’s magical world. A meaty book, with touches of brilliance, that enters an infant mind without a hint of sentimental condescension.

Artists can make past cultures pulse with life for today’s lucky kids. Ishtar and Tammuz, a ‘Babylonian myth of the seasons’ that predates Persephone’s, adapted and retold by Christopher Moore and illlustrated by Christina Balit (Frances Lincoln, 0 7112 1090 X, £9.99, pub. October), is a gorgeous picture book. Each page has jewel-patterned borders, the stylised pictures hauntingly rich and atmospheric – it’s easy, perhaps, to make bright joyful scenes lovely, but Balit creates a desolate beauty out of gold and black, blue and brown. One can’t beat ancient myths for narrative power, of course, and Pavilion have added another volume to their handsome collections: The Songs My Paddle Sings (1 85793 244 7, £14.99). It’s a substantial book of North American legends that offers insights into a lost way of life; collector James Riordan writes with grace and a formal vitality, and Michael Foreman’s paintings have both tenderness and grandeur – one is left grieving all over again for the white man’s crimes.

We know that fairy tales resonate through Adèle Geras’s older novels, so who better to retell some classic ones for young readers? In a striking picture-storybook, Beauty and the Beast and Other Stories (Hamish Hamilton, 0 241 13533 8, £12.99), her calm prose stands firm against Louise Brierley’s mysterious illustrations, lit up as if they were on stage yet with a soft-focus soapstone texture. No such clouds of unknowing linger round the splendidly sturdy Quentin Blake Book of Nonsense Stories (Viking, 0 670 86982 1, £14.99, pub. November). Time to remind ourselves that Blake is not just a consummate artist, who has already illustrated every nonsense writer you can think of (Aiken, Hoban, Yeoman, Mahy, Freud, J P Martin and Dahl are all here, enlivened again with fresh drawings), but a writer and anthologist of wide literary experience (so there’s Allais from France and a teenage Austen, a Waugh letter and a surprising Richard Hughes). A delightful book, but one to sip from: guzzling greedily at one sitting spoils the taste.

Everything’s new in You Wait Till I’m Older Than You!, illustrated by Shoo Rayner (Viking, 0 670 86729 2, £9.99, pub. October) and I loved it all: ‘hilarious poems by Michael Rosen’, and so they are, but also wise, precise and compassionate – windows on to family life. So, knowing what he thinks of idiots with fixed ideas about poetry, I’ll enrage him (he’s awesome when he’s roused) when I say I still can’t see why many of these anecdotes should have been broken into short lines and called poems: they’re rhythmic, yes, but so is much speech and all good prose. And Rosen’s a master of both. But perhaps no one would publish anecdotes, no matter how funny or wise …

I is for India, by Prodeepta Das (Frances Lincoln, 0 7112 1056 X, £9.99) is an iceberg – there’s a lot beneath the surface of that neat alphabet formula. The exotic photographs, ranging from dazzling umbrellas to family groups, reveal more each time they’re studied, and the captions offer a wealth of social detail. So simple, so engrossing: the travel industry should take note. Indeed, children’s books often outshine adult guides for adventurous design and clarity, even, or perhaps especially, those for the very young, like Moonlight’s luminous ‘First Discovery’ series. Their new ‘Atlases’ – The Earth (1 85103 246 0), Space (/245 2), Animals in Danger (/244 4) and Civilizations (/243 6, £6.99 each, pub. October) – are, as we’ve come to expect from this technique, literally revealing in a spectacular way, as the sea rolls back from its underwater mountains and the coliseum springs to life again.

A Hostage to War (Hamish Hamilton, 0 241 13583 4, £10.99) is an autobiography, told quite without rhetoric, which grips like a thriller. In 1942, when she was 13, Tania Vassilieva was taken from her mother and little sister by Nazi troops to labour in the fields and factories of Germany, although the family had already suffered unthinkably in Russia’s occupation. Her tragic young memories are translated by Anna Trenter, with an historical commentary. Despite its horror, the book shows with amazing gentleness the depths and heights that individuals can reach, and is gloriously uplifting – unlike such novels as Gudrun Pausewang’s The Final Journey that also desperately want new generations to learn from the evils of the past. Yes, Tania survived (her post-war everyday courage is equally astonishing) while millions perished, but the young are not served well by our snatching hope and inspiration from them, even in the cause of truth. Happy endings may be impossible, but hopeful ones are essential.

Hope is hard to hang on to in Anne Fine’s The Tulip Touch (Hamish Hamilton, 0 241 13578 8, £9.99, pub. October), but it is there. The jacket gives a handhold: ‘No one is born evil. No one.’ The violent despair of Tulip’s home inexorably moulds her fate, and the outside world can’t, or refuses to, see. Only the narrator, powerless through youth, and in whose life this strange child becomes almost an incubus until she breaks free of their mutual obsession, feels guilt for Tulip’s betrayal. This is far more than the story of a pre-teen friendship: the emotional detail of the girls’ games and fantasies, the peerless intellectual vigour of Fine’s writing, and the provocative question of whether our society is even trying to catch its ‘evil’ ones in their headlong fall, make this an extraordinarily powerful novel.

Provocative, too, and teasingly self-conscious, is Russell Hoban’s The Trokeville Way (Cape, 0 224 04631 4, £12.99 – is it Cape’s or Hoban’s name that adds quids to a short novel?). Narrated by a 17-year-old remembering a turbulent mental period before his 13th birthday, it hovers on the brink of adult knowingness as it examines the mixed-up pieces that constitute the jigsaw of the sub-conscious. A mysterious painting sucks young Nick into its Daliesque world, where he meets (in a Lewis Carroll sort of way) not just his own fears and dreams but those of its creator and previous owners. The novel plays with language and time, space and reality, and with how we see ourselves – a puzzle, an adventure and a challenge. I haven’t untangled it yet, and it hasn’t let me go.

I’ve long admired Philip Pullman for his rollicking inventiveness: a prolific storyteller, he experiments endlessly and unpredictably with style and technique, putting as much energy into his ‘minor’ tales as his award winning epics.Clockwork (Doubleday, 0 585 40755 6 £9.99, pub. October) is a jolly little metaphysical fairy-tale-cum-horror story set in a typically Pullman German mountain village (vaguely 18th century), where a clockmaker’s apprentice sells his soul for fear of failing and the kind heart of a pretty little girl saves the day. Opinionated chorus-like commentaries pop up with Peter Bailey’s pictures, and great time is had by all.

Mortality, death and love, with humour and mystery thrown in, are all in the brilliantly conceived The Pits, Leslie Howarth’s best novel yet (Walker, 0 7445 4108 5, £8.99). A cheeky 9,000-year-old teenage ghost – and why, indeed, should the teenage spirit have changed? – records the true story of his life, and that of a newly uncovered Iceman, on the computer of an archaeological lab. Eerie, touching and intriguing, his story, slowly surfacing like the Iceman within Howarth’s, concerns universal human needs and the arrogance of experts, growing up and dying. Just packed, in fact, with creative energy.