Cassandra Darke by Posy Simmonds (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
As a small child, the artist and author Posy Simmonds used to sit under the table with a book and, hidden by the long tablecloth, listen enthralled to the grown-up conversations going on above her head: “I was aware of an adult world where things seemed to go terribly wrong and awful things happened.” Almost seven decades later she is still recording an adult world where things go terribly wrong, in pictorial narratives in which satire is mixed with vivid curiosity and an inexhaustible relish for the strangeness of everyday life.