Judith Kerr based her Mog books on the peculiar behaviour of the nine cats she shared a home with during her long and impressive life. In her autobiography ‘Creatures’ she says that the best of these stories were based on real events. The sixth book in the series was inspired by Felix, son of Posy … Continue reading
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s list of my favourite picture books and graphic novels of 2015 comes another ten books for children, these ones containing more words than pictures. It’s a stupidly broad category that includes stories about trains, wolves, refugees, pills, Christmas, tigers and tapirs. And that’s just how I like it. Five … Continue reading
In The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved My Life, Andy Miller takes a long hard look at the books we read and the books that we say we read. Realising that the closest he has come to reading a book for pleasure since the birth of his … Continue reading
N is for New York. Sometimes a book can get weighed down by its cultural baggage, The Snowy Day more than most. In 1962 New Yorker Ezra Jack Keats produced one of the first children’s books with a black protagonist. At first it was hailed as a landmark in publishing, but as time went by … Continue reading
Today is tygertale’s 1st birthday. By happy coincidence (and much more importantly) it is also Judith Kerr’s 90th birthday. To celebrate I went out and bought a copy of her autobiographical new book Creatures. ‘That book is simply gorgeous‘ the charming young man behind the till in Foyles rightly pointed out as I went to … Continue reading
