Josie Smith in Hospital

Magdalen Nabb's Josie Smith is one of the great undersung child protagonists in British children's literature — a working-class Lancashire girl whose misadventures are rendered with real emotional truth rather than sentimentality. The hospital story in particular is the kind of reading that can actually help a child feel less frightened before a procedure, and the Smarties Prize pedigree confirms what the prose demonstrates: this is carefully crafted children's fiction. Less well known outside the UK than it deserves to be.