Matilda

Matilda Wormwood is five years old and has read more books than most adults will read in a lifetime. Her parents — the odious Mr and Mrs Wormwood — cannot understand this and cannot value it. Nor can the monstrous Miss Trunchbull, the headmistress who rules her school with terrifying physical force. But Matilda has a gift that no one has noticed yet, and when she finally discovers what she can do, everything changes.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda is one of the great children’s novels of the twentieth century — a perfect embodiment of the fantasy every bookish, overlooked child has ever harboured: that intelligence and imagination are more powerful than size, authority, or cruelty. Dahl’s wit is at its sharpest here, his villains at their most magnificently awful, and his portrait of a child’s inner life at its most precise and most loving.

For any child who has ever found refuge in books — which is to say, for every child who becomes a reader. Illustrated by Quentin Blake. Published by Puffin.