The Best Upcoming Children's Books to Read This Autumn

Autumn is when children's publishing tends to bring out its most ambitious work, timed for the school term ahead and the reading habits it rebuilds after a loose summer. This year's crop earns that timing. Fresh middle-grade mysteries sit alongside imaginative time-travel fantasy and picture books willing to sit with genuinely difficult subjects rather than smoothing them over. Here is where to start, by age and by mood.

Picture books

Grace Lin's The Little Stone Buddha is the gentlest entry on this list and possibly the most quietly ambitious. It tells the story of a neighbourhood coming together around a fallen statue, and Lin uses that small, specific event to say something larger about community without ever tipping into the sentimental. It is the kind of picture book that works as well read aloud to a four year old as it does handed to an eight year old to read alone.