With text by a French writer, illustrations by the Spanish Ulises Wensell and a (sickly) foreword by an outreach minister from California, this is the sort of international venture one expects from this publisher. Bizarre, incidentally, that the outreach worker is the only one of the trio to have her name on the cover.

This is a large-format, picture-led collection of Bible stories and the illustrations are indeed beautiful - especially the near abstract depictions of the creation. The later ones are well researched: the architecture is broadly correct, for example, though I have my doubts that the waters of the river Nile were ever so translucently green.

Some pictures are also (I hope deliberately) very funny. There is a wonderfully amazed Moses, and a languid Jonah fast asleep in the belly of the great fish, while Jesus appears aghast at how cold the Jordan is for his baptism. I also like the charmingly young Adam and Eve, though I have reservations about a very literal parting of the Red Sea and pyrotechnics on Ascension Day.

Fun though the artwork is, it does also encourage you to read the text which, though brief, is direct and stylish. It reads well aloud and most of it will be understood by really quite young children. There is also a useful glossary for the adult reader.

For sheer quantity of text, it isn’t great value: no one could accuse its 160 pages of being over-crowded. Nor will everyone feel it was right to devote a third of such a book to stories from Genesis. Such quibbles apart, it is a most handsome and enticing book and deserves its predictable success in the gift book market.