Sam Leith picks his favourite children's books

The journalist and author chooses his six favourite children’s books. His new book, "The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading", examining classics from Aesop to "Harry Potter", is out this week.

Peter Pan

J.M. Barrie, 1904

Much, much wilder and stranger than Disney would have you believe, Barrie's original "Peter Pan" is dangerous, exciting and also, as his creator describes him, a "tragic boy". It's a complex and magical piece of work.

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Available on The Week Bookshop

The Once and Future King

T.H. White, 1958

Malory's "Morte d'Arthur" pushed through White's bizarre sensibility. Radiantly well written, deeply moving, morally serious and wildly funny in the silliest ways possible, it's like nothing else.

Available on The Week Bookshop

Grinny

Nicholas Fisk, 1973

Weird sci-fi/ horror alien home-invasion fantasy. What if a Great Aunt Emma you'd never heard of turned up on the doorstep and said, "You remember me?" and your parents came over all weird and asked her to stay? It traumatised a generation.

Watership Down

Richard Adams, 1972

Adams’s bizarre but thrillingly successful book asks us to take the lives of rabbits as seriously as the lives of Homeric heroes. It’s gripping, punctiliously realistic about rabbit behaviour and biology (except for the, um, psychic one) – and the final page will break you.

Available on The Week Bookshop

Tom's Midnight Garden

Philippa Pearce, 1958

Heartbreaking time-slip novel about the friendship between a modern boy and the Victorian girl he meets when the clock strikes 13 and he finds himself wandering like a ghost through the formal garden that once stood where he’s living. "The Time Traveler’s Wife" for pre-teens.

Available on The Week Bookshop

Goodnight Moon

Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, 1947

On a skim, this postwar children’s picture book is a mimsy bedtime story about a bunny. But what’s going on with the vanishing and reappearing objects and figures? The more you examine it, the more you see. “Goodnight, nobody.”

Available on The Week Bookshop