The best of this year’s children’s books
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
