This list of the greatest children’s books is dominated by titles published before the millennium – but that’s no reflection on the writers of today.
Yes, we live in boom times for children’s fiction, with more books being published than ever before, and in the 10 years that I’ve been reviewing children’s literature for The Telegraph, seldom a month has gone by when I haven’t been sent a picture book or debut novel that has made my heart sing.
But even the most brilliant books take time to become national treasures – and future generations must decide which works by today’s authors have earned their immortality. The stories here have already passed the test of time – and their messages remain as pertinent as ever.
Jump to the age-range you’re looking for:
One-year-olds
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (1969)
by Eric Carle
The best picture books tend to be those that take an idea and spin it out in as few words as possible. Carle’s masterpiece is a case in point, telling the story of a “very hungry caterpillar” who feasts on different foods before pupating and becoming a butterfly. The book has inspired Marxist, feminist and queer interpretations, but was described by its late author simply as “a book of hope”, showing how even the most seemingly insignificant creature can grow up and unfold its talent.
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Where’s Spot? (1980)
by Eric Hill
Spot, a mischievous yellow puppy, has delighted children in 60 languages, and become one of the world’s most instantly recognisable children’s characters. This book was followed by eight more, involving adventures with parents and grandparents, and a conglomerate of animals including a crocodile and a hippo. Mishaps occur – a lost bone, a broken window – but the suspense is always gentle, and the “lift-the-flap” mechanism, of which Hill was the pioneer, turns each story into a gleeful game of hide-and-seek. (“Is he in the box? Is he under the bed?… There’s Spot! He’s under the rug.”)
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Round and Round the Garden (2021)
by Shirley Hughes
It’s part of the magic of nursery rhymes that even babies who can barely speak seem to enjoy them: every child’s library needs an edition. This one, illustrated by the beloved Shirley Hughes, is a sumptuous anthology, published just a few months before the author’s death and drawing on her favourite rhymes from her 1930s childhood. The old chestnuts – Humpty Dumpty; Incy Wincy Spider – need no introduction, while Hughes’s instantly recognisable drawings, with her inimitable eye for domestic detail, make this collection a delight.
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Two- to three-year-olds
Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
by AA Milne
In his 1939 memoir, It’s Too Late Now, AA Milne raged at how the “bear of very little brain” had undermined his reputation as a serious writer. For though Milne wrote seven adult novels and 34 plays, the extraordinary success of Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), with line drawings by EH Shepard, eclipsed any of the Englishman’s other literary efforts. They show Milne to be a brilliant observer of human behaviour, to the extent that the animals in the Hundred Acre Wood, be it pompous Owl or melancholic Eeyore, have become part of the cultural lexicon. And just as you’re never too old to read Pooh, you’re never too young: the books will give any inquisitive three-year-old an Arcadian first step into plot-driven stories.
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Goodnight Moon (1947)
by Margaret Wise Brown
It was initially dismissed by critics as overly sentimental, but has gone on to become one of the most beloved bedtime stories of all time. Using a rhyming poem, Goodnight Moon describes a little bunny’s ritual of bidding things “goodnight”, while watched over by a grown-up rabbit in a rocking chair. “Goodnight stars, goodnight air, goodnight noises everywhere.” There’s no drama, and no surprises – yet the story has a haunting quality, complemented by the dreamy illustrations by Clement Hurd.
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The Tiger Who Came to Tea (1968)
by Judith Kerr
This simple tale of a mother and daughter whose domestic routine is disrupted by the arrival of a stripy tiger is a masterclass in children’s fiction. It has lyrical artwork, a gently anarchic plot, and a warmth that has made its author immune to the vagaries of trends. The beast of the title has been interpreted as a metaphor for the 1960s sexual revolution, or as a symbolic representation of the Gestapo, echoing Kerr’s early years in Berlin. But the author summed it up more plainly: “It was just a bedtime story I made up for my daughter when she was two.”
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Four- to five-year-olds
The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901)
by Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter’s stories contain all manners of horrors, from Squirrel Nutkin’s tail being broken off by Old Brown the owl to Benjamin Bunny’s young family being kidnapped by a hungry badger. The Tale of Peter Rabbit begins with a particularly gruesome image, as Peter’s mother warns him not to go into Mr McGregor’s garden: “Your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs McGregor.” Not always a comforting read, then. But Potter’s exquisite illustrations, with their teasing interplay between fantasy and realism, make for some of the most enchanting children’s stories of all time.
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Just So Stories (1902)
by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling long ago fell foul of the censors, and today is a byword for misogyny, anti-Semitism and imperialism. Yet his greatest collection remains a triumph of lyricism and nonsense, written with an Aesopian ear for animal behaviour. “In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved,” begins this mesmerising anthology, which has enlightened generations of children as to how the Leopard got his spots, and how the Elephant’s Child on the banks of “the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River” acquired a trunk.
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The Magic Faraway Tree (1943)
by Enid Blyton
In a similar vein, Enid Blyton has never been forgiven for creating a Toytown in which golliwogs stole cars. It hasn’t relaxed her stubborn hold on young imaginations: her 600-odd titles still sell at the rate of one per minute. The Magic Faraway Tree demonstrates her winning formula, using brisk prose and suspense to tell the story of three children who discover an Enchanted Wood. You’ll search Blyton’s work in vain for literary flourishes or grand ideas, but her magical land of Wishing Chairs and Find-Outers has attained literary immortality.
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Six- to eight-year-olds
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
by CS Lewis
CS Lewis’s postwar fantasy has inspired more literary analysis than almost any other work of children’s fiction; but it’s part of the novel’s magic that its subtext can be enjoyed in blissful ignorance. Countless fans have reported that they read it for the first time unaware even of its Christian allegory – let alone the academic theories that link the trees in the Narnian woods, like Kerr’s hungry tiger, to the Gestapo. Lewis understood the unbridled power of a child’s imagination: no eight-year-old who has followed the adventures of the Pevensie children will look on a wardrobe the same way again.
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Charlotte’s Web (1952)
by EB White
More than 70 years on, EB White’s novel continues to tug on young heartstrings. On a farm in Maine, a pig named Wilbur befriends a wise spider called Charlotte, who saves him from the slaughterhouse by writing messages in her web to the farmer. White’s simple, sensory prose captures the wonders of the natural world, while portraying the animals with a frankness that avoids any cloying sentimentality. “It’s true, and I have to say what is true,” Charlotte explains when Wilbur expresses disgust at her admission that she finds flies delicious.
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Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
by Roald Dahl
Many consider this novel, recounting a 10-year-old boy’s adventures inside the factory of the eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka, to be Dahl’s masterpiece. It’s a story of extraordinary invention and simple humanity, whose fantastic images – the Oompa-Loompas, the Chocolate River – have become fixtures of our literary landscape. And of all Dahl’s characters, Wonka best embodies the author’s anarchic spirit, with that tantalising taste for the macabre: “Everything in this room is eatable. Even I’m eatable! But that is called cannibalism, my dear children, and is in fact frowned upon in most societies.”
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Nine- to eleven-year-olds
Black Beauty (1877)
by Anna Sewell
It’s often seen as the precursor of the pony-club genre, but this hauntingly beautiful story, narrated by a stallion, has found few competitors. “I learned that a kind word and gentle treatment will do more to help a horse than a whip,” Beauty says, as he tells us how his carefree early days on an English farm were followed by the hardships of life as a cab horse in London, and the heartbreaking death of his friend Ginger. Sewell said she wrote the story to “induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses” – and the pathos of Beauty’s story still leaves readers, both young and old, reeling.
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The Wind in the Willows (1908)
by Kenneth Grahame
The poetic language in Grahame’s story, which is set in a bucolic Edwardian England, might strike the modern child as old-fashioned. But they should persevere: the tale of Mole, Ratty, Badger and their trouble-prone friend Toad is a dazzling combination of enchantment and psychological acuity. As with Winnie-the-Pooh, the characters have acquired a universal quality. We may not be lucky enough to know a Ratty – but we all know a Toad: “I have the gift of conversation. I’ve been told I ought to have a salon, whatever that may be.”
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Goodnight Mister Tom (1981)
by Michelle Magorian
The Second World War has inspired a canon of superb children’s novels – and 40 years after its publication, this remains one of the exemplars. In an unflinching portrait of poverty and neglect, Magorian’s novel tells of an abused boy who’s evacuated to the country at the outbreak of the war, where he’s taken in by the kindly but irascible widower, Tom Oakley. The book has inspired countless film and stage adaptations – but none can do full justice to the intensely moving portrait of two lost souls finding mutual solace.
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Twelve-year-olds and above
The Diary of Anne Frank (1947)
by Anne Frank
“I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone, and I hope you will be a great source of comfort and support.” Thus wrote one young German girl in her diary, on her 13th birthday in 1942, marking the first entry in what would become one of the most important documents of the Second World War. At one level, this book, which was first published in 1947, two years after its author’s murder in Bergen-Belsen, is the portrait of an ordinary teenager. But Anne Frank was an extraordinarily good writer, and her intense, vivid descriptions of the privations and longings of her years spent hiding in an Amsterdam annex are a literary marvel.
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I Capture the Castle (1948)
by Dodie Smith
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” So begins I Capture the Castle (1948), in which our 17-year-old narrator Cassandra Mortmain recounts the highs and lows of her bohemian family as they subsist in genteel poverty in a mouldering castle in 1930s Suffolk. Dodie Smith, who was from Lancashire, wrote the novel while living in California during the war, lending it an almost fevered air of nostalgia: “A mist is rolling over the fields. Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?” There’s plenty of comedy, but the book’s true magic lies in the raw, luminous vulnerability of the heroine’s narration.
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Lord of the Flies (1954)
by William Golding
This story of shipwrecked English schoolboys, and how they descend into barbarism on a desert island, narrowly escaped oblivion itself. “Absurd and uninteresting fantasy” was the verdict of one of the nine publishers who turned it down. But Golding’s chilling and plainly written portrait of the human struggle between civilisation and savagery has captivated generations of young readers. For all his acclaim, including the Nobel Prize, the author insisted that the secret to his success was simple: “What matters to me is that there shall be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”
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