A gorefest in which everyone dies horribly: here’s my book recommendation for kids

One of my new hobbies as I get older is corrupting the young. I did so again the other day with a superbright, very nicely brought-up 11-year-old called Tilly. Her mother was trying to persuade her to read Swallows And Amazons. ‘No, wait, I’ve something much more fun, leedle girl,’ I said. ‘Try this!’

The book I was recommending to her was The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (shortly to be released as this year’s must-see kiddie flick). It’s not exactly literature. In fact it’s not literature at all. But you only realise this when you’ve reached the increasingly feeble second and third books in the trilogy. With the first one you’re too gripped by the storyline to care.

And so it was with Tilly. (And so it had already proved with Girl, with Boy, and cousin Freya and no doubt hundreds of thousands of other kids around the world.) The Hunger Games is the kiddie-lit equivalent of crack cocaine: whoof, one taste, and that’s it — your next 24 hours are wiped out in a frenzy of page-turning.