A pile of picture books to savour – what better start to the year? Experienced authors and artists are met again, and new favourites are found, in these eight books.

Margaret Wild and Freya Blackwood, wonderful book makers in their own right, make a special team in The Treasure Box (Viking, $24.99 hb, 32 pp, 9780670073658). A boy and his father are forced to flee their home as the enemy advances, bombing the town’s library on their way. They take one surviving book with them as a treasure ‘rarer than rubies, more splendid than silver, greater than gold’.