This is one of my new favourite things: it’s I Want My Hat Back, a children’s book by Canadian writer Jon Klassen. It’s just wonderful, a simple tale told with style and great wit. My son and I both giggle like loons when we read it and its follow-on books This Is Not My Hat and We Found A Hat. There’s a wickedly dark sense of humour to it all, which of course is what makes the books so appealing.

Another writer my son and I are really enjoying is Chris Haughton, whose books are just as economical and just as funny, if not quite so dark.

This image is from Shh! We have a plan, in which a group of hunters attempt to track a bird while shushing one of the group. Inevitably the shushed one turns out to have the best plan of all.

It’s a great time to be reading to your children, because not only are we having something of a golden age of picture books but we also have access to all the classics too – so the work of these writers and illustrators sits happily in my son’s bookshelf alongside Dr Seuss and Maurice Sendak. Reading is one of life’s great joys, and introducing it to your children is another.