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Classic Fables: Tales of wisdom and wit from Bloomsbury Illustrated Classic Collections ill. Charles Folkard

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 15 October 2026

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 978180199859

from the Chris Beetles Gallery website: Charles Folkard (1878 – 1963)
Charles Folkard was born in Lewisham, South London, on 6 April 1878, the son of a printer. Educated locally at Colfe’s Grammar School, he began an apprenticeship with a firm of designers, but left to become a conjuror. It was in designing programmes for his shows that he discovered his talent for drawing. He then studied at various art schools – including Goldsmiths’ College and those at St John’s Wood, Blackheath and Sidcup – while beginning to establish a career as an illustrator. Initially contributing humorous drawings to such periodicals as Little Folks and The Tatler, he made his name, in 1910, with illustrations to an edition of Johann Wyss’s The Swiss Family Robinson. A year later, he illustrated The Children’s Shakespeare and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, so initiating a relationship with the publisher, A & C Black, which would last for twenty-seven years.
In 1915, Folkard joined the Daily Mail as a staff artist and, in that position, invented the newspaper’s strip cartoon, ‘Teddy Tail’. When he decided to concentrate on book illustration, his brother, Harry, took over the strip. Another son, Edward, became a sculptor. Having a strong understanding of the appeal of fantasy, he also wrote pantomimes and children’s plays.

Classic Fables is more than a collection of stories; it is a beautifully crafted keepsake. Featuring a gorgeous hardback finish, elegant foil blocking, and a premium ribbon marker, it is the ultimate gift for christenings, birthdays, and the festive season.

Inside, over 100 of Aesop’s most beloved fables are brought to vivid life through the enchanting full-colour watercolours and intricate line drawings of celebrated Golden Age illustrator Charles Folkard. From The Tortoise and the Hare to The Boy Who Cried Wolf, these iconic and lesser-known tales teach gentle lessons in honesty, kindness and wit.

Designed to be read and cherished again and again, this stunning edition will spark children’s imaginations and create moments of shared discovery across generations.

Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild adapted by Bill Streatfeild, ill. Eve Coy

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 14 Sep 2026

Publisher: Hachette Children’s Group
ISBN: 9781444964493

See also illustrated by Eve Coy:
Our Gorgeous Baby [ACHUKA Book of the Day 15 Feb 2024]
Hat Cat [ACHUKA Book of the Day 2 Feb 2022]

The first official picture book adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes, reimagined by Bill Streatfeild, nephew of Noel, and endorsed by the Streatfeild estate.

Meet Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil – three adopted sisters who share a dream of truly making something of their name.

Posy, the youngest of the sisters, loves to dance, twirl and prance. Pauline, the eldest sister, also feels happiest on stage treading the boards as an actress. But, Petrova, the middle sister, would rather be behind the scenes.

As the young girls start their journey at The Children’s Academy of Dance and Stage Training, will they be able to discover their true callings, tap into their own unique talents, and work together to achieve their dreams?

You can follow Eve Coy, the book’s illustrator, on

 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Eve Coy (@eve.coy)

You can find more examples of Eve Coy’s work on this historical blog, which recounts her journey to becoming a published children’s book illustrator after working for 7 years as a 2D animator >
https://evecoy.blogspot.com/

 

The Odyssey retold by Geraldine McCaughrean – Puffin Clothbound Classic

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 3 Aug 2026

Publisher: Penguin Random House Children’s UK
ISBN: 9780241791479

See also:
Under A Fire-Red Sky [ACHUKA Book of the Day 7 May 2025]
The Supreme Lie [ACHUKA Book of the Day 13 Apr 2021]

First published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and a Puffin Classic since 1997, this retelling of The Odyssey is now available in the Puffin clothbound hardback series.

There are now over 40 titles in the clothbound Puffin Classics series. See them all here:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/PCC/puffin-clothbound-classics?page=1

Geraldine McCaughrean is not on Instagram but her website has information about all her books.
https://www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk/portfolio

A String In The Harp by Nancy Bond

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 24 Jul 2026

PUBLISHED 50 YEARS AGO

“I have been re-reading this book for decades. It is not simply a magical timeslip story, a must read for anyone (like me when I was younger) enchanted by the history and mythology of Wales. It is also one of my favorite family stories, with great characterization and its appealing (well, to me) plot of older sister trying to help her family–having to learn to cook, and that sort of thing…These two elements–the magic and the familial–are both treated seriously, and it is the seamless meeting of the two, I think, that made this book such a favorite of mine.” Charlotte’s Library

When fifteen-year-old Jen Morgan flies to Wales to spend Christmas with her family, she’s not expecting much from the holiday. A year after her mother’s sudden death, her father seems preoccupied by the teaching job that has brought him and Jen’s younger siblings to Wales for the year. Her brother, Peter, is alternately hostile and sullen,and her sister, Becky, misses Jen terribly.

Peter tells Jen he’s found a strange artifact, a harp key that shows him pictures from the life of Taliesin, the great bard whose life in sixth-century Wales has been immortalized in legend. At first Jen doesn’t believe him, but when the key’s existence — and its strange properties — become known to the wider world, the Morgans must act together against a threat to the key…and to their family.

Anita Silvey writes of Bond’s work generally:
“[Her] attention to detail makes for some dense writing, requiring a certain level of reader sophistication, but one of the results is the development of believable characters. Bond has a good ear for dialogue and uses it liberally to develop recognisable relationships. Though the protagonists are always adolescents, their worlds are peopled with fully fleshed persons of all ages. Portrayed often are refreshing intergenerational friendships…”

“Bond’s leisurely pace makes her an old-fashioned storyteller of timeless young adult concerns.” Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English

Unleaving by Jill Paton Walsh

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 23 Jul 2026

PUBLISHED FIFTY YEARS AGO

“Unleaving remains on my list of most-admired novels for any audience. In its ambition, its narrative legerdemain, its euphoric prose, as well as its moral and intellectual sobriety, it has few competitors.” Gregory Maguire, 2017, Horn Book

A sequel to Goldengrove 1972.
A critically well-received young adult novel (often paired or published with its predecessor Goldengrove), set on the Cornish coast. It follows Madge Fielding, who inherits her grandmother’s house, Goldengrove, and hosts an Oxford philosophy reading party one summer. The story uses an innovative dual-timeline structure, alternating between Madge as a teenager and as an elderly grandmother (Gran) reflecting on the same events — with the two voices gradually revealing they are the same person.

My books do not really make up a coherent body of work to which I could write an introduction. I write about whatever I am fascinated by at the time, which makes each book different. My governing principle is to make whatever I am doing as simple and accessible as possible. I do that not merely to appeal to children, but as a point of honour – I think it pretentious to do anything else. But also my preferred subjects have lain in that large area of human experience that adults and children have in common. And the making of an adult statement about that common area that is transparent enough for children is endlessly challenging and interesting technically. The rewards and the discipline of writing for the young are very enriching.

Read Jon Appleton’s obituary of Jill in Books for Keeps:
https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/article/obituary-jill-paton-walsh/

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor ill. Ngadi Smart

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 22 Jul 2026

PUBLISHED FIFTY YEARS AGO

“Taylor trusts to her material and doesn’t try to inflate Cassie’s role in these events, and though the strong, clear-headed Logan family is no doubt an idealization, their characters are drawn with quiet affection and their actions tempered with a keen sense of human fallibility.” KIRKUS

The classic story of a girl growing up in the deep South. Set in Mississippi at the height of the American Depression, this is the story of a family’s struggle to maintain their integrity, pride and independence against the forces of a cruelly racist society.

‘We have no choice of what colour we’re born or who our parents are or whether we’re rich or poor. What we do have is some choice over what we make of our lives once we’re here.’

The Mississippi of the 1930s was a hard place for a black child to grow up in, but still Cassie didn’t understand why farming his own land meant so much to her father. During that year, though, when the night riders were carrying hatred and destruction among her people, she learned about the great differences that divided them, and when it was worth fighting for a principle even if it brought terrible hardships.

Winner of the highly prestigious John Newbery Medal in the USA in 1977, the year after it was first published. The book, part of Taylor’s Logan family series, IS a sequel to her 1975 novella Song of the Trees.

Bilgewater by Jane Gardam

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 21 Jul 2026

PUBLISHED FIFTY YEARS AGO

Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up motherless in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity.

Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.

“Of Bilgewater Gardam says, ‘it is the choice that has to be made between the creative and the critical or academic life’. It is also her most seriously funny book. The cramping social worlds of these clever girls have almost disappeared, but their creator’s skill encourages rereading and different interpretations of the details, hence the appearance of new editions on adult lists.” 
Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English

[Together with the two preceding novels, Bilgewater] “established Jane Gardam as a late-arriving, but leading writer of what might be called the ‘second golden age’ of English children’s literature. Her books attracted considerable admiration—Auberon Waugh called her ‘head and shoulders above the normal run—and the only aspect of her work to attract adverse criticism has been the elitism of her frequent literary references, though tit has to be accepted these are integral to her plots.”
Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature

“Marigold Green is obsessed by her plump ugliness and tries to make an equation of James Joyce and Thomas Hardy. As a result there is a mild self-indulgent elitism about the writing, and the adult critic may be  looking back with all too much sympathy to this kind of adolescence. But the wit of expression and the humour of situation save the book[s] from any suggestion of post-Freudian intensity. The younger reader grows in literary awareness by virtue of a bond with an author who shows rather than tells.”
Margaret Meek in Twentieth Century Children’s Writers

Thunder And Lightnings by Jan Mark

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 20 Jul 2026

PUBLISHED 50 YEARS AGO

First published by Kestrel Books , with illustrations by Jim Russell. Set in Norfolk, it features a developing friendship between two boys who share an interest in aeroplanes.

It was the author’s debut children’s book, written in response to a competition jointly arranged by the publisher and the Guardian newspaper.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s the book was widely commandeered by those who were arguing for tighter control of the primary teaching curriculum. In the novel, reference is made to a child getting away with choosing the same topic year after year.

When Andrew’s family moves house, he strikes up an unexpected friendship with his neighbour Victor. There isn’t a thing Victor doesn’t know about the RAF planes flying overhead and the two boys are soon busy tracking their movements.

Then Andrew discovers that Victor’s beloved Lightnings are due to be scrapped…

Thunder and Lightnings won the Carnegie Medal in 1976.

“The integrity of [Mark’s] writing is matched by the integrity of her depiction of the realities of life, and readers respond to the truthfulness of the worlds she creates. Mark reflects on the era concerns of childhood with perceptive accuracy and wry humour; scrupulous observation and penetrating analysis of human nature characterise her writing.”
Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English

Highly recommended website – JAN MARK IS HERE
https://janmark.net/remembering-jan/

Ahab and the White Whale by Manuel Marsol tr. Chloe Garcia Roberts

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 4 Jun 2026

Publisher: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9798896230052

“In this lush, meditative retelling of Moby-Dick, Marsol evokes a markedly different vibe than the original, rendering Captain Ahab as more dreamer than diabolical. Ahab himself narrates via spare, conversational text that takes a reckoning tone… This contemplative and elliptical take may not cast a wide net, but it’s still a whale of a tale—one in which obsession opens Ahab to wonder rather than sealing his fate.” Publishers Weekly
“The Spanish artist Manuel Marsol takes the story of Moby-Dick and turns it into something else, something exquisite, that captures the spirit of Melville’s classic while steering us into new and unfamiliar waters. Gone is the deranged captain of the original, destroyed by his hate for the “unconquering whale”. Instead, the Ahab who leads this story is a curious wanderer who despite his best efforts cannot see what’s right in front of him. Or behind him. Or sometimes underneath him.” The Times

This, the Spanish illustrator’s debut children’s book, was first published in 2014 and won the III Premio Internacional de Álbum Ilustrado Edelvives (a prize for an as-yet-unpublished picture book organized by the Spanish publishing house Grupo Edelvives). This is a new English translation of a revised edition.

The greatest novel ever written begins “Call me Ishmael” and the story is told through the eyes of the crew member. In this notable picture book condensation of the tale, Ahab and his quest are given centre stage. 

“Call me Ahab,” it begins.

On the island of Nantucket lives the greatest whaling captain of all time. Call him Ahab. He has long searched for the great white whale known as Moby Dick.

Whenever Ahab heard any news of the whale, he rushed off to sea in his ship the Pequod. He climbed mountains, scaled sunken wrecks, crossed oceans without any luck. He wasted whole days shut up in his cabin. He traveled to the ends of the earth, but still the whale was not to be found.

Ahab spent so much time on the hunt that he even forgot what he was looking for.

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A post shared by Manuel Marsol (@manuelmarsol)

Here, in a 10-year-old interview, Manuel explains how important working as an animator for Flying Tiger Stores was in the early stages of his career.

The translator, Chloe Garcia Roberts, is herself a poet and managing editor at the Harvard Review. You can follow her on

Rumpelstiltskin by Mac Barnett ill. Carson Ellis

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ACHUKA Book of the Day 12 Mar 2026

Publisher: Scholastic US
ISBN: 9781338673852

See also by Mac Barnett:
The First Cat In Space And The Soup Of Doom [ACHUKA Book of the Day 17 Nov 2023]
Twenty Questions [ACHUKA Book of the Day 6 Apr 2023]
The Three Billy Goats Gruff [ACHUKA Book of the Day 16 Jan 2023]

“[Barnett’s] sly retelling is perfectly complemented by art that at times resembles classical portraiture. Ellis also harkens back to fairy-tale images of yore with both lushly illustrated gouache pictures and small interstitial black-and-white spot art. Characters present white. Deeply familiar but infused with 21st-century smarts; expect cries for repeated reads.” KIRKUS
“Rumpelstiltskin pops out of trap doors and flaming hearths like a demonic figure from medieval or early modern theatre, his nutcracker grin obliterated by the queen’s correct guess while steam pours out of his ears at his defeat. Other historical homages—the relatively flat color palette of blues, greens, and browns, the wall tapestries in the palace—enhance the storybook feel while bringing minimalist freshness to the page.” MUSE
“Short, punchy text juices the tale’s momentum (“Deal,” the girl replies to the wily man’s offers), while portraits trace the miller’s daughter’s journey from frog-catching child to regal royal and back again in this haunting tale about the power of knowing someone’s name.” PublishersWeeekly

Rediscover a tale of gold spun with lies . . .

Once upon a time there was a clever girl with a not-so-clever father.

When her father claims she can spin straw into gold, the king forces the girl to perform this impossible task.

She has other choice than to accept a strange deal from a mysterious little man. But when he arrives and attempts to collect the debt, the fiendish trickster Rumpelstiltskin discovers that he is the one who has been tricked!

Follow Mac Barnett on

And follow Carson Ellis there too: