Every adult should read more children’s novels. Here are the five best

 What would you say if I offered you a pill that was guaranteed to make you fall in love with the world again? A pill for which the side effects include bouts of terror, fits of laughter and intermittent waves of compassion for strangers in the street. A pill that isn’t technically illegal and yet is so threatening to regressive authorities that some versions of it are banned in many US States.

Okay, you’ve read the title of this article. You know I’m not talking about some new illicit drug, but the quietly subversive, and utterly transformative act of reading children’s books as an adult. I’m here to tell you why you should head to a very different section the next time you enter a bookshop.

As we move through life, we can often become increasingly stuck in a fixed story of who we are. We go to work, we pick up the kids, we order the same meal from the takeaway on a Friday night. And the same goes for our reading tastes. Maybe we’re the kind of person who only reads realism or “big idea” nonfiction, or novels where pensioners solve more murders than the Metropolitan Police. It is no wonder we get into reading ruts. Maybe it’s time to break from routine.

But this goes beyond our reading habits. Every day we’re confronted by conflict, ecological crisis and the chilling resurgence of far-right nationalism. It’s easy to find ourselves locked into a cycle of doomscrolling and emotional burnout, making us feel small and powerless in the face of such a soul-destroying world. One of the best ways to break this cycle is to enter a world of literature filled with characters who are not yet resigned to the inevitabilities of life.

To read children’s fiction is to shed our adult baggage and re-enter a state of possibility when the world was still up for grabs. Open one of Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching books and you will see the world through a new lens as the young witch dissects the assumptions that prop up reality with her razor-sharp mind. And this lens can be turned inwards too, reminding us what we are capable of.

When we read A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness or Alex Wheatle’s Cane Warriors, we walk with the young protagonists as they stand up to heart-shattering grief or the brutality of slavery. They are confronted by worlds they can’t control but they tackle them head-on because they have no other option. Children’s books allow us to revisit notions of resilience and hope, courage and love, but distilled into a purified form. They are, in the memorable words of author Katherine Rundell, “literary vodka”.

That’s all well and good, you might say. But I’m tired and busy and I have a stack of “grown-up” novels to get through. Why should I listen to you?

The answer is because I did it myself and it genuinely changed my life.

I had always loved reading as a kid, but I had an older brother and like every younger sibling I shamelessly stole his albums, his clothes, and more importantly, his books. I couldn’t wait to ditch the children’s stories that were far too unsophisticated for upwardly mobile kids like myself. So, instead of reading Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, I was busy being baffled by William S Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or traumatised by Ian Banks’s The Wasp Factory. The world of children’s fiction soon dwindled from view.

For as long as I remember, I’d felt a deep sense of restlessness but never quite knew what it was. I ricochetted through school and university, then bounced from one unsatisfying job to another, but when I reached my mid-thirties I came slamming into a wall. I was trapped in cycles of self-destructive behaviour, swamped by negative thought spirals resulting from undiagnosed ADHD.

I muddled along in a haze of distraction and adult fiction seemed unable to speak to the disconnect I felt inside. Then by pure chance I picked up Millions by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and everything clicked into place. The book was so funny I thought I might asphyxiate laughing, and yet it spoke of grief and love and value with diamond-sharp clarity and not a shred of sentimentality. I devoured Millions in an afternoon and instantly went hunting for more.

Rediscovering children’s fiction was like finding a door in my flat that I had never seen before that opened into a whole other universe. I didn’t stop reading adult fiction, but I had discovered a world of literature that scratched an itch deep in my core that I hadn’t known existed. I’ve been coming back ever since, stepping across the threshold into the kaleidoscopic worlds beyond. Connecting with characters who were fluid and unfixed showed me that I could break the cycles in my own life and set out on a new path.

And if you want to step through that door but don’t know where to start, here are five suggestions to help you on your way.