Will I love The Number Devil?

Among my children’s bedtime stories The Number Devil was a favourite. It’s about a boy who finds his school maths lesson dull and pointless. One night in his dreams he gets visited by the Number Devil, who introduces him to the astonishing patterns to be found in numbers. By making the lead character a maths-sceptic, the author carries the reader along so that we are all drawn into the hidden beauty of mathematics. The book has wonderful colour illustrations, which adds to its charm. Parents love it too.

This is a higher reading level than the other books on this list, but it’s SO worth it. A bizarre creature drags a math-hating kid on a transformative adventure in the world of numbers. It’s all here: prime numbers, number patterns, even my beloved Fibonacci. The illustrations are beautiful, and the writing lighthearted and lovely. The author is a famous German poet who, as far as I know, has only written this one for kids. We’re lucky he did.