Animal magic: a choice of children’s books
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.
