The best children’s authors of 2015 — after David Walliams

The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and have done with it. And indeed, Grandpa’s Great Escape (Harper Collins, £12.99), about the sympathetic friendship of a grandfather and grandson, is funny, productive of intergenerational goodwill and spikily illustrated by Tony Ross, though, as my son observed, it’s a pity so many nice people in Walliams’s books end up dead at the end.

Or else you could get any of these: Jacqueline Wilson’s Katy (Puffin, £12.99), a take on What Katy Did, which my daughter liked because the heroine is a tomboy; the latest ‘Tom Gates’ from Liz Pichon (Scholastic, £10.99), which is like O-type blood, universally acceptable; or the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School by Jeff Kinney (Puffin, £12.99), as usual, deadpan hilarious. You can’t go far wrong with any of them. Or indeed with the new Legomanual — Awesome Ideas (DK, £16.99) — which is full of good stuff.

The trouble is, aficionados of Walliams, Wilson et al have probably got hold of their own copies by now. But it’s possible that they haven’t yet got round to Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes (Puffin, £12.99). Riordan’s ‘Percy Jackson’ series, about the contemporary American offspring of the Greek gods, was just genius — sort of Mary Beard meets South Park — even though it ended on a dud note. Now he’s turned his attention to the hero stories: Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, the works. It’s right up there with Enid Blyton’s Tales of Long Ago as a way of introducing contemporary youth to the sex and violence of classical mythology (including Pasiphae and the bull — to which Percy’s considered response is: ‘Eeuww!!’) Here, ‘laugh-out-loud-funny’ isn’t a figure of speech.

Another good bet is Jonathan Stroud’s Lockwood & Co: The Hollow Boy (Corgi, £7.99,