Jim Field (David Baddiel) Books in Order

Jim Field’s collaboration with David Baddiel is less a strict series and more a run of big, funny, stand‑alone adventures that clearly belong together. Each story takes a child with a very specific wish—different parents, better skills, more exciting days—and pushes that wish until it explodes.

In The Parent Agency a frustrated boy, Barry Bennett, escapes into a parallel world where children can browse for new parents like products. The Person Controller follows twins Fred and Ellie, expert gamers who are given a mysterious controller that seems to work on people instead of consoles. Both books tap into familiar playground fantasies—what if I had better parents, what if I could do anything—and then show the knots that power would tie you in.

AniMalcolm starts from the opposite angle: Malcolm despises the animals that fill his family’s house and sees a school trip to a farm as torture. A goat’s strange magic turns him into a series of animals, forcing him to live inside the very creatures he’s always avoided. It’s funny and slapstick, but it’s also about empathy, identity and finding out who you are by literally walking in someone else’s hooves or paws.

In Birthday Boy, Sam Green wishes it could be his birthday every day and gets exactly that, with exhausting results. The shorter story The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked gives routine‑obsessed Alfie one night of total freedom with a babysitter who refuses to say no. Both tales play with the classic warning to be careful what you wish for, while still feeling gleeful and slightly anarchic.

Across these books, Field’s illustrations do a lot of quiet storytelling. His characters have rubbery faces and sharp little details in their clothes, bedrooms and gadgets, which makes the jokes land harder and the emotional moments feel less heavy. Full‑page scenes break up the text for newer readers, while doodles and diagrams underline just how over‑the‑top the situations have become.

Taken together, the Jim Field and David Baddiel books are a great fit for readers of roughly eight to twelve who like their stories fast, silly and grounded in real family life. You don’t have to read them in any particular order; each one stands alone. What links them is a mix of wish‑fulfilment, school corridors, big set‑pieces and the quiet realisation, at the end, that ordinary life with imperfect parents and friends might be worth hanging on to.