My favourite book…

The award-winning poet and author, Michael Rosen, is the fifth Children’s Laureate

Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner (Red Fox, £5.99 PB) is a novel that is not only exciting, funny and subversive, it is about a child who learns the value of money, the delights and dangers of the big city, his own strengths and weaknesses and how, through cooperation, we can achieve a lot. It has an accessible and interesting narrative style, with special pages where the narrator talks to the reader about his characters. It is deservedly a book that is read all over the world.