Children's literature

You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration,

Early one morning, Alan Garner goes to let the hens out. The hens live in a hutch in the garden of Toad Hall in Blackden, Cheshire, a medieval dwelling which Garner has made his home since 1957, not many miles from where all his forebears – artisans and smiths – lived and worked for generations. Something glints in the light, catches his eye. ‘It is thin, translucent, honey-black and sharp; sharper than a surgeon’s steel.’ He knows just what it is. A flint, a tool, a precision instrument. ‘I am the first to know in the eight to ten thousand years since the last hand that held it.’ Alan Garner