By Matt Haig
How a poor woodcutter's son named Nikolas walks north into the snow to find his father and grows up to become Father Christmas.
Nikolas is a poor woodcutter's son with almost nothing to his name: a turnip his father carved into a doll, and his father, who loves him. When his father sets off to find a hidden village of elves and doesn't come home, Nikolas goes after him, walking north into the snow with a mouse in his pocket and, before long, a reindeer at his side. What he finds up there is colder and stranger than the stories promised. It's also where the boy who will one day be Santa really begins.
Matt Haig writes the way Roald Dahl did, with real warmth and real cruelty in the same book, so the magic feels like something Nikolas came by honestly instead of something handed to him. There's genuine cold and hunger before there's any wonder. It's also a proper long adventure, a good step up in stamina for a child who's ready for one story that carries all the way through instead of short chapters, and Chris Mould's black-and-white drawings run right through it. If your child loved that Dahl made you wait out the misery before Charlie got his golden ticket, this one will feel familiar. And there's a whole series behind it.