I thought it would be interesting to look at this year’s World Book Day in the light of the recent news that Boris Johnson and Carrie Symonds are expecting a child. 

Usually I would sift out the children’s classics, and advise the prospective parents to order Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the gently wise Mouse and Mole books, by Joyce Dunbar, as soon as possible.

Perhaps expecting a child might focus the prime minister on educating and bringing up children. 

So we need to recommend writers who play out the what-if questions about how the adult world perceives and treats children - and what the consequences of their actions might be.

In which case, I would recommend the following five titles: 

1. The Children Act, by Ian McEwan 

This novel offers an engrossing moral question about when a child is adult enough to decide whether or not to receive life-saving treatment at odds with his religious convictions. 

Writing for a secular, science-orientated society, McEwan has his work cut out to make the issue sufficiently balanced to sustain the debate and the reader’s interest. 

McEwan’s books are rarely simple. The judge’s marriage is breaking down, and she operates within a system in which errors and misrepresentation of people have led to tragedy. 

You’ll instantly recognise the legal precedents and real-life tragedies. Read it in parallel with McEwan’s The Child in Time, and you’ll realise how committed McEwan is to the discussion of what children mean to their parents, the judiciary and society as a whole. 

2. My Sister’s Keeper, by Jodie Picoult 

This has been enormously successful, both as a novel and a film. The plot involves the ethical choice parents face when they decide to create a sibling to provide living life support for their seriously ill child. 

It’s a powerful tale of legal challenge and procedure, and a very human drama when played out in the confines of the sisters’ relationship. 

I’m not sure how I feel about the final plot twist, though: I can’t decide whether it’s an easy way out of an unresolvable situation or a clever irony. You’ll have to read it to decide for yourself.

3. The Crucible, by Arthur Miller

This is arguably the best play of the 20th century. It’s mainly studied as a political parallel to the McCarthy witch hunts that bedevilled 1950s America. 

But perhaps The Crucible should also be read while thinking about the girls who led the outcry, resulting in the execution of so many innocent people. 

Late 17th-century Salem was a restrictive place to live. Expecting children to walk with eyes modestly lowered and their arms by their sides, with no thought in their heads other than those planted there by parents and leaders, is so repressive that rebellion was inevitable. 

Add to that the ways in which unscrupulous characters like the Putnams are prepared to use their own children to further their land ambitions, and the play begins to read as a fable about the ways in which adults should not project their ambitions through their children.

4. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood 

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian thriller that gets better with every read. 

The novel reflects modern angst about the consequences of war and science on the reproductive capability of men and women. 

The handmaids are the few fertile women left in the state of Gilead. Kept in a pseudo-religious community, their purpose is to provide children for the infertile couples at the top of the hierarchy. 

It’s a thriller about a woman escaping the repressions and abuses of a powerful patriarchal state, but it also puts voice to modern concerns about what might, in the future, deprive us of families and children.

5. The Princes in the Tower, by Alison Weir 

This enduring real-life whodunit tells the story of the mysterious disappearance and murder of Edward V and his brother, the Duke of York, Richard Plantagenet. 

It’s a heartbreaking tale about two pawns in a much larger political power struggle between two factions: one led by their uncle Richard III and the other by their mother’s powerful Woodville kin. 

It’s also the tragedy of a mother losing her two sons, who were taken more or less forcibly into the “care” of their uncle. He had them declared illegitimate and kept in the royal apartments of the Tower of London. What happened to them subsequently is unknown. 

Weir provides an intricately detailed account that cannot fail to grip and enthral the reader.

The intrinsic value of childhood

The common theme of these works is the intrinsic value of childhood. Adult ambitions, preoccupations and convictions are play out through the lives of the children they manipulate. 

The best thing about the world of books is that it offers balance and great entertainment, particularly when children are there to save adults from themselves and the world from destruction. 

A counterpoint list of redemptive child-based reading would have to include Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider books. This man certainly knows how to handle cliff-hangers and plot twists.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is a wonderful trilogy, now augmented by the new Book of Dust sequence. A powerful young protagonist, Lyra, continues to save a number of worlds through her imagination and audacity. 

And, of course, there are books too numerous to mention that show how children solve crimes best when their parents are away on holiday. 

Just think: if life were more like fiction, the Symonds-Johnsons could happily go abroad, leaving the country in the very able hands of their child. Now that would make an interesting plot twist.

Happy World Book Day!

Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama in a secondary school in the South of England. She has contributed chapters on workload and wellbeing to Mentoring English Teachers in the Secondary School, edited by Debbie Hickman (Routledge)