Christmas, I always think, is a time for visits from large and portly imaginary friends.

Christmas, I always think, is a time for visits from large and portly imaginary friends. So perhaps it??s right that one of the chief delights of the season in the 8-to-12-year-old reading market has been a book that manages to capture the real via the imaginary.

AF Harrold??s The Imaginary (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is fanciful in that it??s about a girl, her dreamt-up friend and a man who survives by eating such imaginaries, but it also seems very realistic, and rather true to the experience of imaginary relationships. Rudger fades when he??s not with Amanda, and finds himself in danger when she is in hospital.

Emily Gravett??s illustrations are playful and so charming they??ll never fade from memory. Is it, however, the way that people ?? whether it??s Amanda, her mum, or even Rudger himself ?? feel about these imaginary beings that give it allure and trueness to life?

And, of course, we can??t go through the season without an old fairy tale being brought back for another once upon a time. This year, Neil Gaiman is brilliantly and thrillingly bringing us two.

Hansel and Gretel has always been one of the darker Grimm tales, a story never to be told to little ones just before bedtime, yet I don??t think I??ve read a version of it quite as eerie or chilling as Gaiman??s Hansel And Gretel (Bloomsbury, £14.99) . The author takes us on a journey into the tale??s darker corners, setting-up so it seems real, rather than fairy tale.

Here is a war-torn land of starvation, and an exploration of how war can push ordinary people to the brink and beyond. Soldiers, ??hungry, angry, bored, scared men??, steal the ??cabbages and the chickens and the ducks??. A hungry mother wants to kill her children; their father, though reluctant, still enters the plot. And the nightmare is intensified by Lorenzo Mattotti??s writhing black and white india ink illustrations, reminiscent of woodcuts, yet more fluid.

And that??s not all. Gaiman has also brought us The Sleeper And The Spindle (Bloomsbury, £12.99), illustrated by Chris Riddell, a Snow White meets Sleeping Beauty fusion tale, with dwarves and dark humour, that sees a whole land suddenly and hauntingly overcome by sleep.

But it??s not all darkness. There are also giggles to fill the Christmas stocking and, of course, David Walliams has pride of place, heading the great laugh-fest. His latest kid hit, Awful Auntie (Harper Collins, £12.99), made me groan inwardly on seeing the title. Another one of those Dahlesque tales where the ladies are ghastly and gruesome, I thought.

Yet Aunt Alberta, who is the very embodiment of awfulness in a fabulously eccentric, mean and cruel way, is actually Walliams??s finest villain ?? she and her Great Bavarian Mountain Owl, Wagner, make for a deliciously chilling and dastardly duo. Walliams deftly shows his narrative skill, giddily diverging, historicising, jumping back and forth, all with a slightly wicked sense of narratorial whimsy.

Posh eccentrics have always made entertaining children??s book material, of course. The titular star of Harriet Whitehorn??s debut, Violet And The Pearl Of The Orient (Simon and Schuster, £8.99), is a nine-year-old detective and avid tree-climber ,and is only slightly posh. She has a housekeeper, a jewellery designer mother and lives in a ??stylish and incredibly tidy flat??, and is friends with Dee Dee Derota, former Hollywood starlet. There are also plenty of cats.

Needless to say the arrival of the seemingly posher Du Plicitouses (who have a Siamese cat rather than a moggy) is the beginning of trouble ?? particularly when it turns out that Dee Dee??s jewel, the Pearl of the Orient, has gone missing.

If it??s cats you like, then the latest in Jennifer Gray??s feline detective series, Atticus Claw Learns To Draw (Faber & Faber £5.99), sees the reformed cat burglar on the trail of art world crime. There he is, just painting away with his paws in the Butteredsconi??s Italian Pickle painting competition, and suddenly he finds himself winning and lured into a mystery. Worth it for the delightfully silly feline puns alone.

The centenary year of the start of the First World War is not over, and is still provoking great children??s literature. For a really poignant read, it??s worth returning to the trenches with Kate Saunders in her moving sequel to E Nesbit??s classic, Five Children On The Western Front (Faber & Faber, £10.99).

Here, the kids who once stumbled on the Psammead are no longer Edwardian innocents, but young adults, and war, as the book commences, is looming ?? just the time for that grumpy sand fairy to turn up. The Psammead doesn??t like wars. They are ??painful and untidy, ,he says. And Five Children On The Western Front doesn??t flinch from the pain and the horror, though it delivers them touched by a little magic.