What’s cooking in Acorn Wood?

Julia Donaldson’s classic series returns in our guide to the best new children’s books

Every well-read toddler will be familiar with Julia Donaldson’s Tales from Acorn Wood series, in which Fox loses his socks, and Rabbit has difficulty napping. And now finally, after 20 years, comes the fifth instalment, Cat’s Cookbook (Macmillan, £6.99), in which Donaldson uses her beloved rhyming text to tell the story of a cat in search of a recipe. “Could this yellow book be right?/ It’s very big and fat./ No – it’s full of stories/ About a vampire bat.”

And no exhausted new mother should be without Slow Down… in the Park (Magic Cat, £7.99) by Freya Hartas, which promises to “bring calm to baby’s world” by dint of some gentle observations of nature. “As the DAWN begins to break, it wakes the LILIES on the lake… At DUSK, while creatures softly doze, the lilies’ petals slowly close”.

EARLY READERS

Penny and the Little Lost Puppy (Walker, £12.99), written and illustrated by Emily Sutton, tells the story of a little girl who befriends a puppy in the garden of her new home, then determines to find him when he disappears. (“The park was FULL of dogs… But the little dog with the black smudge was nowhere to be seen.”) Sutton’s intricate illustrations complement her simple, gently suspenseful prose.

After the phenomenal success of The Girls, Lauren Ace’s uplifting sequel, The Boys (Little Tiger, £11.99), charts the formative friendship between four boys as they move from childhood to adulthood. (“The boys had been friends for as long as they could remember and a little while before that.”) With illustrations by Jenny Løvlie, this is a nostalgic story with a refreshingly modern feel.

For fans of Aunt Amelia by Rebecca Cobb, there is finally a sequel, Aunt Amelia’s House (Macmillan, £12.99). Seven years on, Aunt Amelia is as eccentric as ever, and when the children to go to stay with her, they discover the adventurous side of household chores.

The sumptuously illustrated Sail by Dorien Brouwers (Little, Brown, £12.99) uses the story of a boy on a sailing adventure to deliver some gentle wisdom: “When the wind refuses to blow your way, adjust the sails without delay… And if you ever do fall in, it’s time to try your best to swim.”

EIGHT-PLUS

By Ash, Oak and Thorn (Chicken House, £7.99) is a stunning children’s debut by the nature writer Michelle Harrison. “In the garden of 52 Ash Row, next to the trampoline, was an ancient tree with an interesting-looking hole at the bottom of its trunk.” So begins the magical story of Moss, Burnet and Cumulus, three tiny, ancient creatures who are made homeless when their natural habitat is destroyed.

Fans of Ele Fountain, author of Boy 87 and Lost, will find plenty of white-knuckle drama in Melt (Pushkin, £7.99), about a boy living in a remote Arctic village, threatened by the melting ice. “The weather is changing, and centuries of knowledge cannot keep up.”

Maria’s Island (Walker, £10.99) is the children’s debut by Victoria Hislop, in which she tells the story of the deserted island of Spinalonga, Greece’s former leper colony. The tale is narrated by Maria, one of the children in Hislop’s novel The Island, from which this engrossing yarn is skillfully adapted for younger readers.

Forty years after its publication, Goodnight Mister Tom – Michelle Magorian’s immortal novel about a wartime evacuee – still deserves a place on every child’s shelf. The i Cat flaps: Cat’s Cookbook is the latest in the Tales from Acorn Wood series

anniversary edition (Puffin, £12.99) contains a new short story by the author, touching on Mister Tom’s past.

The Swallows’ Flight (Macmillan, £12.99) is the much-anticipated sequel to Hilary McKay’s Costawinning The Skylarks’ War, and joins the next generation of characters as they come of age during the Second World War. McKay is a glutinously atmospheric writer, and this dense, action-packed saga – written during lockdown – is every bit as satisfying as its predecessor.

The racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks, darling of the Chipping Norton Set and Telegraph columnist, has also spent lockdown busy at his typewriter. The Super-Secret Diary of Holly Hopkinson: This is Going to be a Fiasco (Harper Collins, £6.99) is his first children’s novel, and is narrated by a nineyear-old girl telling the story of “me… without any of the rubbish adults usually put in”.

Holly is no Pepys. But, like all the bestselling child diarists, she knows how to milk a drama: “My dad just lost his job, which means me and the rest of my family have to leave London and move to the middle of nowhere, which is a TOTAL DISASTER! There’s no Wi-Fi, the local kids are FERAL and there’s animal poo EVERYWHERE!”

‘Could this yellow book be right? It’s very big and fat. No, it’s about a vampire bat’