By David Walliams
The richest boy in the world can buy anything he wants except one real friend.
Joe Spud is twelve, and his dad has made billions off a two-sided toilet roll that's damp on one side and dry on the other. So Joe has a private movie theater, an orangutan for a butler, and his own Formula One car. What he doesn't have is a friend who likes him instead of his money. He talks his dad into letting him leave his fancy private school and start over at an ordinary one, hoping that's where he'll finally find one.
If your child loved how Charlie and the Chocolate Factory mixed silliness with a real ache underneath, this is the closest a living writer gets to that. Walliams hands you the whole Dahl setup: a lonely child, ridiculous grown-ups behaving badly, a fortune that fixes nothing. Tony Ross's scratchy drawings do for him what Quentin Blake did for Dahl. The toilet jokes are funny, and Joe's loneliness underneath them is real.