The best of this year’s children’s books

In some children’s books, nothing much happens. In Roberto Piumini’s Glowrushes (Pushkin Press, £9.99), it’s like this: a father, a great Turkish lord, hires an artist to paint his sick son’s rooms for his 11th birthday, and together the boy and the painter create walls of wondrous imaginary landscapes. It turns out that you don’t have to travel outside your own room to inhabit new worlds. One wall is for the meadows of a goatherd, with tiny red goats, a lame dog and a distant minaret and a muezzin with a big nose. Another is for a besieged castle with a lovely princess atop a tower. And one room has glowrushes, wheat grasses which shine in the dark. It’s hard to say what age this story is meant for, but it reminds me of The Little Prince, where everything has its own logic.

Plenty happens in Gill Lewis’s Moon Flight (David Fickling Books, £7.99), a departure from her usual stories grounded in the natural world. It’s about a dockland rat called Tilbury, the seventh ratling of a seventh litter – and you know what that means. His thirst for adventure takes him on a quest to return the rats’ great stolen diamond, the Cursed Night, to its rightful owners. With his clever sister Nimble Quick, he braves endless dangers to find the Golden Rats, only to discover trickery and betrayal, from which they escape in a flying machine. It’s a cracker of a story, with characters no less feisty for being rats and with a lot to say about our capacity for being deceived by appearances. A moral tale with rodents: genius.

Jon Klassen is a sublime storyteller and illustrator, and his latest, The Skull (Walker, £14.99), is a haunting story about a little girl called Otilla who is running through the woods (we never do find out from what or whom) and finds a house where a skull in the window gives her shelter.