While the adult world is having trouble getting to grips with Brexit, children’s authors are taking a new approach: translating the whole sorry mess into a story with animals, where they hope it will start to make clearer sense.

Two new picture books attempt to make Brexit accessible to children. Smriti Prasadam-Halls and Robert Starling’s The Little Island sees a gaggle of geese hatch a plan to leave their farm, only for their solitary life on an island to go wrong. And in Richard David Lawman and Katie Williams’ I Want to Leave This Book, a cast of animals vote – unsuccessfully – on which sort of story they’d like to be part of.

Prasadam-Halls’ modern-day fable, described by Gruffalo illustrator Axel Scheffler as “an Animal Farm for our times”, has already sold out of its first print run. A paperback edition is now being brought forward to meet demand.

“In The Little Island, I’ve tried to translate the complexity of recent events into a story simple and satisfying enough for the youngest – and oldest – child to grasp and to present a conversation starter, a launchpad, to some of the more serious issues of our time,” says Prasadam-Halls, whose book opens with a quote from one John Duck: “No goose is an island entire of itself; every goose is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Before writing the book, she had been deeply troubled by the changes she was seeing in British society.

“We’ve started to hear words being used again that we have long considered to be totally unacceptable. It has been so troubling to hear aggressive slogans and toxic language used in the highest of offices. Language has such power and when words are used as weapons they cause great damage,” she says. “So I have tried to speak a story of solidarity and friendship into that landscape.”

Her setting felt “absolutely natural” for a dissection of the divide between leave and remain. “Farmyard animals lend friendliness and charm and bring unexpected humour and warmth to what might otherwise feel a heavy topic – especially as we see ourselves parodied in the story,” she says. “They also help us to feel a degree of empathy for all the characters – whichever side of the bridge they are … Animals help us get closer to the heart of the issues and feel a shared humanity.”

Animals also dominate Lawman’s picture book, published by Manchester-based WatAdventure, although in more specific roles: Theresa May appears as a hamster, Boris Johnson is depicted as a highland cow and David Cameron is a pig named Percy Hogtrotter. It sees the animals debating whether they are better off staying in the book, or leaving for a better experience in another. When a majority votes to leave, they can’t agree on what genre they want to be in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A spread from The Little Island. Illustration: Andersen Press

Lawman says he came up with the book when he realised he couldn’t explain Brexit to his curious four-year-old daughter: “I Want to Leave This Book is the answer to my dilemma – and clearly one that parents across the UK are facing.”

WatAdventure surveyed 1,000 UK parents to discover that while 70% of children knew the term Brexit, only 27% of parents could give a detailed explanation of what was going on to their offspring. Another 8% admitted that they felt so confused about the situation themselves that they couldn’t clarify it for their kids.

Both Prasadam-Halls and Lawman are clear that the books had to work on their own, as well as acting as Brexit explainers. “The other reason for using animals, of course, is for the purposes of allegory. Parents and teachers have the choice of whether they want to go deeper with the story – or not. It stands as a story in its own right,” says Prasadam-Halls.

“We need to make these complex political issues as digestible as possible to ensure that younger generations truly engage and understand the wider moral backdrop of these events,” says Lawman. “But first and foremost, we wanted this book to be fun to read, even without the Brexit context.”