The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and have done with it. And indeed, Grandpa’s Great Escape (Harper Collins, £12.99), about the sympathetic friendship of a grandfather and grandson, is funny, productive of intergenerational goodwill and spikily illustrated by Tony Ross, though, as my son observed, it’s a pity so many nice people in Walliams’s books end up dead at the end.
Or else you could get any of these: Jacqueline Wilson’s Katy (Puffin, £12.99), a take on What Katy Did, which my daughter liked because the heroine is a tomboy; the latest ‘Tom Gates’ from Liz Pichon (Scholastic, £10.99), which is like O-type blood, universally acceptable; or the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School by Jeff Kinney (Puffin, £12.99), as usual, deadpan hilarious. You can’t go far wrong with any of them. Or indeed with the new Legomanual — Awesome Ideas (DK, £16.99)
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