David Fickling Books is a small story house based in Oxford. Three of us editors work here, David, Bella and Hannah. We choose the very best stories or narratives we can find for people to read. It’s a great job. We don’t choose very many, sometimes as few as just one book a month, sometimes a novel, sometimes a picture book, sometimes poetry.

We are not so much interested in how many pages a book has, as to how much space the storyteller needs to tell the story  properly. And we choose our storytellers and writers very carefully indeed. We don’t think we do a whole lot, but making that choice is the most important thing we do.

Our proudest boast has always been that our books ‘work’. That doesn’t sound like a big claim, I suppose, but it is. By ‘work’ I mean that we reckon that if you pick up and read a DFB book or if you give it to a child then the chances are that you or they or both are going to be taken by it in some way, taken to tears or to laughter or to a world that you won’t want to leave.  A DFB book will move you.

Of course you won’t like everything we do. Not all our geese are swans. But I reckon the chances are that you will.