Eelvaade:

Thirteen-year-old Defne joins her archaeologist aunt on the dig at Göbekli Tepe, the 11,600-year-old stone monument that turned the textbook story of civilisation upside down. Built by hunter-gatherers thousands of years before farming, writing or the wheel, the site's carved T-shaped pillars become Defne's way into archaeology, Neolithic life and the question every curious mind asks: how do we know what we know? It's a learning book that reads like a detective story, and a smarter gift than a gift card.

Eelvaade:

Eleven-year-old Sigrid from Oslo discovers that the very first Secretary-General of the United Nations was a Norwegian, Trygve Lie, and sets out to understand how 193 countries manage to sit at one table at all. Chapter by chapter she follows the UN from its 1945 founding in San Francisco to today's Security Council, peacekeepers, UNICEF and the Sustainable Development Goals, and she gets an honest look at where it works and where it gets stuck. The book ends with Sigrid running her own Model UN in class, just in time for UN Day.

Eelvaade:

On the morning of his seventh birthday in Raja Ampat, Raka gets his very first snorkel mask from Grandpa. Under the waves he meets Pelangi, a chatty little clownfish whose coral garden is losing its colours, and the two set off on a gentle undersea quest to bring it back to life. In the end Raka works out that the best birthday present is one you give back to the sea.

Eelvaade:

On the night of Brazil's Children's Day, seven-year-old Caio spots tiny tracks in the sand near his grandmother's beach house in Bahia. A nest of baby sea turtles is about to hatch. With his grandmother and a local turtle ranger, he has to guide the hatchlings past the bright lights of the village to the moonlit sea. It's a warm story about patience, courage, and protecting the ocean, with the child's own name on every page.

Eelvaade:

In Mysuru, eight-year-old Aditi is finally trusted to help her grandmother build the family's Bombe Habba, the tiered Dasara doll display, and to place the precious pattada bombe, the king-and-queen dolls her grandmother received at her wedding. Each night of Navaratri, one doll whispers its story to her: a Channapatna wooden elephant, a clay potter, a Yakshagana dancer. Each story reveals the generation of the family that brought it home. On the last night Aditi adds a doll of her own to the steps, then walks with her grandmother to see Mysuru Palace light up, and learns that the best heirlooms are the stories you keep telling, in the language you first heard them in.

Eelvaade:

Eight-year-old Piyali lives in Kumartuli, Kolkata's old potters' quarter, where her grandfather has shaped clay goddesses for Durga Puja for fifty years. This autumn his hands have begun to tremble, and the eyes of the goddess still need to be painted. Piyali has to find a steady heart before she can find a steady hand. It's a warm story about craft, family and letting go, told in the flowing curves of the Bengali script.

Eelvaade:

Twelve-year-old Adéọlá walks into the museum at Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and asks the question every curious student eventually asks: how did artists a thousand years ago cast bronze heads more lifelike than anything in Europe at the time? This learning book answers it properly — the lost-wax method, the chemistry of copper and tin, kiln temperatures, the guilds of Ifẹ̀ and Benin, and the live argument over where those bronzes belong today. It is a science book, a history book and an art book wearing the same wrapper, written in Yoruba and timed to Nigerian Independence Day.