Piers Torday

Children’s books provide the perfect escape from coronovirus

Piers Torday chooses his favourite authors, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Sue Townsend

‘The Torrent of the Valley of Glencoe’: a scene from Kidnapped, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth. Alamy 
issue 11 July 2020

The lockdown we have been enduring has at times felt drawn from the pages of a children’s book. The eerie quiet of the deserted public square has had something of the earliest fairy tale about it, as if we were all slumbering in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. At the same time, the apocalyptic media landscape of death graphs will have been familiar to fans of the latest young adult dystopias.

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