Goodbye Mog By Judith Kerr Collins Children’s Books pound;9.99

Captain Duck By Jez Alborough Collins Children’s Books pound;9.99

Albie By Andy Cutbill Collins Children’s Books pound;10.99

Chimp and Zee and the Big Storm By Catherine and Laurence Anholt Frances Lincoln pound;12.99

Were Aesop working as a creator of picture books today, he’d have had no problem selling international rights, which is crucial if you want to publish 32 pages in full colour. The reason being, of course, that animal tales are powerfully universal stories about people, free from the stumbling-blocks of cultural specificity.

Harry Horse’s Little Rabbit Lost seems like a book that’s been around forever, and with any luck it will be. Little Rabbit wakes up on his birthday with delusions of maturity, reckoning he’s a big rabbit now, and asserts his independence at an all-bunny theme park.

Of course, he soon gets lost, but is saved by the visibility of his red balloon. The multiplicity of domestic dramas played out in the illustrations of the enormous rabbit family reward repeated readings, with the individual character of each family member meaning that they all have their own stories to be followed. Harry Horse’s work, with its quiet charm and pathos, deserves the over-used phrase, “deceptive simplicity”.

Killing off characters in a soap opera is a convenient way of retiring an actor or actress. But killing off a children’s book character, especially a long-standing and successful one, takes some guts. Judith Kerr’s Goodbye Mog features the ghost of the departed cat (who goes to sleep forever on the very first page) bearing witness to her own burial and her family’s mourning. Mog’s ghost also has to come to terms with the presence of the new kitten, her replacement, and she floats up to the sun only once the family has named the kitten and she’s satisfied she will not be forgotten. It takes a delicate and expert hand to craft such a book on the rarely-touched-upon theme of mortality.

Captain Duck continues the hapless adventures of Jez Alborough’s hit character, the bungling enthusiastic Duck in the Truck. In this adventure, Duck is at his most infuriating when he hijacks Goat’s boat for a jaunt with his long-suffering friends, only to be stranded due to his carelessness. Well laid-out and with a keen eye on characterisation, Captain Duck uses its comic-strip panels to good effect.

Albie by Andy Cutbill features an endearing lad with a wild and cheeky imagination, who conjures up a whole menagerie of unlikely animals to blame for his mindlessly troublesome behaviour. Big sister Mary plays Margaret Dumont to Albie’s Marx Brothers, and ends up being the comic victim of Albie’s excess. Albie is Calvin and Hobbes for very small children, and despite being a TV spin-off, it is as high-quality as most other picture books, and certainly more skilfully illustrated than most.

Catherine and Laurence Anholt’s Chimp and Zee appeared on the bookshelves to much deserved acclaim last year. There is a sense that the Anholts have spent years building up to these characters, based loosely on their own twins when they were very young. Chimp and Zee has a contemporary zest and only slightly-rounded edginess delightfully free of punkification. In the second book, Chimp and Zee and the Big Storm, the Anholts have clearly worked hard to create a stylishly simple and rhythmic illustrative style and design, which complements a skilfully monkeyfied text loaded with catchy refrains and plenty of monkey puns.

Chimp and Zee have been likened to Babar, but this description does a disservice to Chimp and Zee (re-read the Babar stories and you might be surprised at how lumpen they are in comparison). On top of all that, these books are big, resplendent and fun simply to behold.