Fantasy, god tales and espionage

Some of the titles you can pick up for your children - and the child in you - this summer.

Eragon, Narnia reissues, Lemony Snicket, Pokemon... everything in children's fiction seems to come with a trademark and a special boxed set, but there are still a few exceptions.

OUP has just released The Oxford Illustrated Children's Tagore, edited by Sukanta Chaudhuri, with everything from the cards in Taasher Desh to the curious menagerie from Abol Tabol. And Puffin offers the very useful Puffin Good Reading Guide for Children (Puffin, Rs 195).

8+: Meera Uberoi reworks the old tales, in Lord Ganesha's Feast of Laughter (Puffin, Rs 160), where the elephant god baffles Kubera with his appetite at a feast, invents the tabla and swallows Vishnu, Brahma and Lakshmi.

In Swagata Deb's The Amazing Adventures of Little (Rupa & Co, Rs 95) the heroine visits a land where time goes backwards, solves mysteries, and discovers what furniture does when it's left alone at night. And in Moin and the Monster (Penguin India, Rs 155), Anushka Ravishankar introduces an utterly delightful monster who sings off-key and complicates Moin's life at school.

10+: Eoin Colfer is just out with Half-Moon Investigations (Miramax Books, £5.95). At 12, Fletcher Moon is a detective with his first case ""who stole the lock of hair off a pop-star's head that April Devereux bought off e-Bay?

12+: Cornelia Funke is back; in Inkspell (Chicken House, $13), Meggie must deal with the problems of stories "" reading them, writing them and of course, being in them. Payal Dhar tries her hand at a fantasy series "" in instalment one, A Shadow in Eternity (Penguin India, Rs 295), Maya has to adjust to a world of Seekers, magical training and dark menace. Megan Whalen Hunter offers more of Eugenides' adventures in The Queen of Attolia (HarperCollins, $5.25), where our hero the thief must steal a man, a queen-and peace.

With Blood Fever (Puffin, £6.99), the second book in the young James Bond series, Charles Higson makes his claim to have timeshare rights in 007 alongside Ian Fleming as James has a nasty brush with Count Ugo Carnifex and the evil (but pulchritudinous) Countess Jana.

Carl Hiaasen's Flush (Knopf, $12) is his second book for kids. The villain is Dusty Muleman, who's polluting Florida's lakes by, well, flushing human waste into them. Hiaasen chucks in the works "" pirates, ailing turtles and two intrepid kids, Noah and Abbey Underwood "" and has a blast while he's at it. This one's for the kids; and the grown-ups too.