Sítio do Picapau Amarelo

On a farm in the Brazilian interior, a grandmother called Dona Benta keeps a house where the impossible is simply admitted at the door. Her granddaughter Lucia — everyone says Narizinho, Little Snub Nose — has a rag doll named Emilia who woke up one morning, began talking, and has never since said anything but exactly what she thinks. There is a corncob gentleman, the Visconde de Sabugosa, who is a scholar; there is a cook whose folk tales are treated as primary sources; and there is a pinch of magic powder that will get the household to Greece, or to Neverland, or to the bottom of the sea, before supper. Monteiro Lobato wrote these from 1920 into the late 1940s and effectively invented Brazilian children's literature while doing it. The stories run from The Saci and the early Yellow Woodpecker Grange tales through Trip to Heaven, The Reform of Nature and The Size Switch, taking in mythology, arithmetic lessons, Greek gods and Pinocchio's brother along the way, with modern collections and spin-offs still arriving. The tone is anarchic and affectionate: a farm where children argue with talking dolls about how the world ought to be run, and generally win. Begin with the earliest tales of the sitio and let the household assemble itself around you. Each story stands alone, and the pleasure is cumulative rather than sequential.