Playing the Shape Game, By Anthony Browne with Joe Browne (Cape £25)

(Anthony Browne )

In this beautifully and generously illustrated, large-format combination of memoir, career retrospective and guide to illustration, the author, illustrator and current Children's Laureate, Anthony Browne, uses the "shape game" which he and his brother played as children – whereby one draws an abstract shape and the other transforms it into a recognisable object – as a metaphor for his entire career, and the creative process itself.

"Virtually all my books feature some sort of transformation," he says. Left: an illustration from "Willy's Pictures" (Walker Books, 2000), in which Browne pastiches Winslow Homer's "The Herring Net" (1885), with added bananas.