Earlier generations of children loved Edith Nesbit. So did I, and the ordinarily extraordinary stories still bewitch

It was Nesbit who, almost a century before JK Rowling invented Harry Potter, had put the fantasy and magic into children's literature with novels such as Five Children and It and The Phoenix and the Carpet

Despite [Nesbit's] fantastic plots, which generally hinge on some highly imaginative form of magic - her books were among the earliest to portray kids from their own point of view. Nesbit's best-known characters, the independent-minded Bastable children, jockey fiercely for position among themselves, but they always unite in the face of adult intervention

Sometimes you have to break the rules, particularly when those rules are based on prejudice. Naidoo breaks the rules, producing books for young people which recognize that they want to know about the real world

Genuinely enlightening ... gently moves the reader through areas that are hard to think about.