Age 3-6
Picturebooks need to engage and delight children while also entertaining the adults who read them aloud. Hughes's new picturebook achieves this end triumphantly. Her drawings inhabit a child's emotions, so that young readers understand and empathise from the body language and facial expressions alone. At the same time the book resonates for adults; it is Dogger meets A Midsummer Night's Dream, with echoes of Peter Pan. An old toy, a donkey (Jonadab), can secretly fly. When he does so in Holland Park at night, he meets fairies, who garland and befriend him, à la Titania and Bottom, but his tiny toy companion Rita proves a more faithful friend. Through a filter of gentleness, the images images recall Fuseli, Richard Dadd and Arthur Rackham. Hughes's line perfectly conveys character and event, while the colour and wash express streams of moonlight, the whooshing flight of pigeons, the soft, velvety texture of the donkey.

Jonadab and Rita by Shirley Hughes
Bodley Head £10.99

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