Books like Morris Gleitzman

This is the closest companion to Once without feeling like an imitation. Its narrator is a nameless Warsaw street child who understands the world through scraps, boasts and invented identities. Like Felix, he can be funny precisely because he does not fully comprehend the danger gathering around him—and the reader’s greater understanding makes every innocent observation hurt.

Spinelli’s spare, swift prose gives the novel the momentum of an adventure while quietly dismantling the narrator’s fantasies. A widely admired novel from a Newbery Medal–winning author, Milkweed captures the rare quality that makes Once unforgettable: a child’s imagination is both dangerously inadequate and magnificently necessary.

Conor is visited after midnight by a monster who promises to tell him stories—but insists that Conor must eventually tell the story he fears most. The setting is far removed from Felix’s journey, yet the kinship is profound: both novels understand storytelling not as escape from reality, but as the means by which a child can approach an unbearable truth.

Ness writes with Gleitzman’s clarity and emotional directness, moving between dread, anger and flashes of dark humour without becoming sentimental. With Jim Kay’s brooding illustrations, A Monster Calls became the first book to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal. It is short enough to read quickly and powerful enough to remain lodged in the mind for years.

Ada has been kept indoors by an abusive mother who is ashamed of her clubfoot. When wartime evacuation offers an unexpected route out, she enters a world in which freedom, affection and safety are things she scarcely knows how to recognize.

What will matter to a reader of Once is Ada’s voice: sharp, literal, resourceful and shaped by what adults have refused to explain. Bradley never turns suffering into easy inspiration; she shows how courage can coexist with fury, mistrust and desperate hope. This Newbery Honor novel has inspired unusually devoted readers because its hard-won warmth feels honest. Once Ada begins discovering what her life might contain, it becomes almost impossible not to fight for that possibility alongside her.