Jimmy, Lucy, and All (TREDITION CLASSICS)

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Beautifully wrought story about the way secrets bring you together and tear you apart, and about the competitive relationship between a brother and sister from a fine writer best known for his brilliant books for teenagers. Highly entertaining book about Eric, a perfectly ordinary boy, who feels his nose becoming cold and wet and his ears becoming floppy as he is transformed into a dog.

In its own schoolboyish way Eric's transformation is just as interesting and surreal as that of poor Gregor Samsa into a beetle. The Roald Dahl must-read for this age-group; they'll find it impossible to resist even if they are hooked on the Danny Devito film version.

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In fact, seeing the film leads naturally into wanting to read the story of the remarkable Matilda, ignored and derided by her parents and bullied by the odious teacher Miss Trunchbull, who not only has a brilliant mind but strange kinetic powers. A brilliant, empowering book that shows children that they don't have to be helpless even in the face of the most bullying of adults.

Wonderful story about the disagreeable Mary Lennox who, after her parents die, is brought back from India to live in her uncle's great lonely house on the moors. Hodgson Burnett captures the fury of being a helpless, lonely child that makes both Mary and the invalid Colin behave badly.

Eight-year-olds are likely to get frustrated by the sentence construction. Either read it to them or wait a couple of years.

Classic children's library: 8-11

Modern environmentally and health-conscious youngsters might eye the fox hunting and smoking with horror. But this story of Barney, a small boy who makes friends with a strange, Stone Age type boy he finds living in the local quarry, is enormously appealing. A really rollicking straightforward read that celebrates a strange friendship and the way two are better than one when it comes to taking on the bullies. Stig's puzzlement at the modern way of life makes the reader look at the world from a slightly different perspective. The girls are enrolled in stage school so they will be able to earn a living.

It all seems slightly quaint now, but Streatfield's characterisations are wonderfully vivid, the writing straightforward and honest and the narrative a page-turner. Quite delightful and infinitely more real than all those titles currently being churned out for ballet-mad little girls. No spoonfuls of sugar are necessary to help this classic tale slip down. Jane and Michael's new nanny turns out to be the intimidating Mary Poppins, who brings a little magic into the lives of children in the Edwardian middle classes' equivalent of "care". Yes, the Harry Potter books are derivative and hierarchical, but Rowling's a genuinely witty writer with a terrific gift for naming things: What's more, they are real page-turners and appeal to boys and girls equally.

The second in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is the weakest; the third, The Prisoner of Azkaban the best, not least because the Dementors are so truly terrifying. But these kinds of arguments are academic: I've yet to meet a child who is resistant and plenty of adults find them just as spellbinding.

Eight upward, but younger brothers and sisters are liable to get in on the act earlier, particularly if you read it to them. It runs to 8hours and 23minutes, which sure beats nine hours of I Spy.

Written in , Cresswell's stories about life in a small Welsh village where Lizzie wanders the streets with her head in the clouds seem almost to come from another century. But while village life has changed out of all recognition, the emotions of Lizzie, who wants something exciting to happen in her life, who loves her soft dad and rather severe mum but keeps getting into scrapes and who meets a witch in the way other people run into the milkman, remain as fresh as a daisy. A touch of romance and a shiver of fear are to be found in this Carnegie Medal-winning fantasy, set in the beautiful valley of Moonacre where the moon princess once ruled.

Old-fashioned, but there is toughness beneath the whimsy. More for the girls than the boys. A classic that doesn't reduce the world - on the contrary, it opens it up - but which does view it from a child-sized perspective. It tells the story of a family of little people who live beneath the floorboards and borrow from "human beans" who don't even know they exist - until the young Arietty makes friends with "the boy upstairs". There is nothing in the slightest bit twee about it.

Norton writes brilliantly, viewing the world as if through the eyes of her little people with a sense of wonder and terror. Even children who are addicts of the excellent but bastardised film version and the superb BBC serial version will gobble this up on the printed page. Jessica loses her house in the blitz and is evacuated before the rest of her school to a huge Welsh castle with only the gardener and housekeeper for company.

List of children's classic books

But she is not alone; the castle grounds are full of other mysterious presences including a ghostly boy, a sinister green lady, a screeching peacock and chains of desperate "stonestruck" children, engaged in a deadly game of tag with Jessica as the quarry. Cresswell writes with a spare, dense poetry about the desolation of separation, the isolating effect of unhappiness and the need to take care about what you wish. A really spellbinding piece of grown-up writing for children that makes the Goosebumps series pale into insignificance.

It can be read alone at 10 upward, but both are very satisfying for adults to read to the 8-upward age range. In a different vein, but just as good, is Cresswell's Snatchers - the story of a girl whose guardian angel appears in the local park to protect her from the Land of the Starless Night. Liable to engender plenty of hilarious discussion about whether angels have belly buttons. Yes, yes, we know. Ridiculously middle-class and old-fashioned and full of Christian imagery, the triumph of good over evil and being a jolly good sort.

But really it is magic, provided you take care not to force it down your children's throats too early. Some of the sentence structure is quite difficult and you really need to be eight upward and a confident reader not to be put off. But it's like getting into the wardrobe in the first place: Of course this isn't actually the first in the series - The Magician's Nephew is - but this is where you should begin. Joan Aiken's classic adventure story is set during the imaginary reign of James III in the early part of the 19th century when the recently completed channel tunnel has allowed wolves to overrun large parts of Britain.

A really rollicking story, with plenty of wild flights of the imagination, it has the essential ingredients of lost parents, an evil governess and two feisty cousins, Bonnie and Sylvia, determined to evade the clutches of the evil Miss Slighcarp. The good news for those with keen readers is that there are more than a dozen books in the Willoughby Chase sequence. The bad news is that although featuring the memorably stroppy heroine Dido Twite, some of the subsequent novels are off-puttingly obscure.

Funny and tender storytelling from the excellent Susan Cooper. This one is about a boggart that is accidentally transported from his remote Scottish island to the bright lights of Toronto, and doesn't like it one bit. Life seemed grim when father lost his job and the family had to move to their aunt's home. But with the arrival of Johnnie the pig, things begin to improve. Childhood is somehow golden in E Nesbit's stories about a family of children who discover a Psammead or sand fairy, a grumpy and very ancient creature that can give them wishes.

The difficulty is of thinking of really good wishes and not getting things that they really don't want at all, and even the simplest of wishes seem to get them into great difficulties. This book is such fun that children want to gobble it down in one sitting and are absolutely amazed when you tell them it was written almost a century ago. It seems so fresh because it gets to the very heart of being a child - the wonderful sense that anything can happen to you and probably will.

To the average nine-year-old girl, Jacqueline Wilson's books are as desirable as a trip to Claire's Accessories and a pair of the latest fringed jeans. This story of ten-year-old identical twins Ruby and Garnet, who lose their mother and have to come to terms not only with their dad's new love but also with growing up and growing apart, is a model of Wilson's exuberant and confessional storytelling style, in which Ruby and Garnet take it in turns to tell the story.

Wilson's books can be too obviously issue-driven to be really satisfying, but they are a stepping-stone into a real world where real kids face tough emotional problems.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury (Walker, £14.99)

Plenty to choose from: Join Hazel and his brave band of rabbits as they set out in search of a new home. Richard Adams's modern classic is not fluffy or cute at all. In fact, it's so good that you completely forget after a while that we're talking rabbits, not humans. It is two children against the rest of the world in Thomas's riveting tale about Julia and Nathan, who win popularity at school when they find a stash of money in a deserted house, but soon decide to flee when teachers and parents want to know where it came from.

Elizabeth Townsley, her mother, was born in Northumberland in northern England, where her father had been a horse dealer and a showman with a traveling circus. The family moved to Fetterangus in northeast Scotland in , and Lucy remained there until her death in Like her father, all of Lucy's brothers were first-class instrumentalists on bagpipes, fiddle, pennywhistle, or accordion, and her sister, Jean, was a professional musician with her own dance band.

So it was often Lucy who took responsibility for looking after Jean's children while she was out performing. Jean's daughter, the respected contemporary Scottish traditional singer Elizabeth Stewart, loved the songs she heard her aunt sing, and she has followed in the footsteps of both her mother and aunt by forming her own dance band and singing many of the songs she learned from Lucy.

The Stewarts of Fetterangus were a family typical of the traveling folk. Often suffering discrimination from members of settled society, Travelers tended to socialize with other Travelers, exchanging songs, stories, and gossip and keeping alive the rich Scottish traditions that were beginning to be forgotten among other groups. In the s and s when folk-song collectors like Kenneth Goldstein were seeking out performers of traditional material—communities in which songs and stories were still handed down orally and the ballad tradition continued to thrive—Travelers communities like the one in Fetterangus proved to be a gold mine.

Ballads are essentially stories told in song. There are, however, many songs which tell stories yet are not ballads. Ballads additionally tend to start in the middle of a story and put emphasis on dialogue and action rather than description. There are generally a limited number of characters featured in the narrative, often no more than three, and story lines tend to involve lots of blood and gore, often with a generous dose of fratricide, incest, adultery, and the supernatural.

Many Scots-language ballads date back to the early medieval period, and some are probably considerably older.

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