Jon Klassen

Toby Alone by Timothée de Fombelle begins: ‘Toby was just one and a half millimetres tall, not exactly big for a boy of his age. Only his toes were sticking out of the hole in the bark where he was hiding.’ So we enter a world of a big tree and its Liliputian – actually smaller – inhabitants. It’s a world much like ours except for size, as if you were to transplant a French colony from the 1940s to a giant oak. It has its own politics (all too recognisable), its social pecking-order, its own sense of them and us, the chief division being between Tree People and Grass People. You wouldn’t catch the Borrowers eating grubs and cricket’s legs, but here it’s perfectly natural. The book won umpteen awards when it was published in France in 2006.

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.