‘Gijsbrecht is a hero.’ That is the first line of Gijsbrecht. Heroes fight, as we all know. Heroes enter bravely into the fray, heroes give their lives for their cities, heroes don’t run away. But that’s not always pleasant for a hero’s wife. Gijsbrecht’s wife, Badeloch, would rather have Gijsbrecht home more often, rather than off performing heroic deeds. She finds it hard to be a hero’s wife: ‘I saw it coming – at our wedding the storm swelled and has never died down again.’ A beautiful sentence, notes a character who hears her lament. And he’s right – Edward van de Vendel does put beautiful sentences in his characters’ mouths.

The barrage of aggressive exclamations this picture book opens with – ‘Biff!’, ‘Bam!’, ‘Wham!’, ‘Thwack!’, ‘Smack!’ – appears to be appealing to toddlers’ liking for noise and violence. The aggressiveness, however, ebbs away entirely in the following passage: ‘The blows rain thick and fast. The walls hit back – but only gently’.

The book is situated successively in a provincial town in the Netherlands, a summer camp in Knoxville, USA, and a town in Norway, is about the budding identities of two boys. In order to discover who he is and what he is capable of, after his final exams, Tycho who had an extremely sheltered upbringing, leaves for a year at an American summer camp.

Super Guppy is a collection of fifty-one wonderful, multifaceted poems for children of six years and up. Van de Vendel stays close to home: splashing through puddles and getting your socks wet, being tucked in at night by Mum, and having a plaster on your knee – ow! – taken off. To these familiar things, he adds dimension, an unusual way of seeing things, to make the young reader work a little. The storm lashes at the windows, but it breathes too, just like the child, for instance. Or a dead blackbird lies ‘folded flat / in the station on the ground’ and no one notices, not even Mummy.

De gelukvinder is a spectacular book for adolescent readers, in which Edward van de Vendel relates the eventful life of Afghan refugee Hamayun, a seventeen-year-old whose character is based on that of co-author Anoush Elman. Together with his family, Anoush fled from the Taliban, ending up in the Netherlands more or less by chance, after an incredible journey.

‘Seeing him was always a surprise, because he was so beautiful and white, and a little bit mysterious.’ Nine-year-old Kix and his younger sister Emilia fall in love with a big Pyrenean mountain dog the instant he walks into their lives. The dog is nervous and thin, with sad eyes and tangles in his ‘warm snowy fur’. Slowly the children gain his trust. But where did he come from?

This heart-warming story is one of Edward van de Vendel’s best books so far, mainly because of its tone. Based on a true story, it flows as if telling itself. Kix’s voice and experiences strike the reader as utterly authentic.

There are plenty of children’s books about imaginary friends, but this poetic tale is just a little bit different. The fantasy creatures that appear to Moonie and her brother Raf are like totem animals, symbolizing their characters. They help Moonie to become more self-confident and Raf to control his anger.