Beastly Tales From Here And There and Three Chinese Poets, both by Vikram Seth (Phoenix, £9.99 and £7.99)

I THOUGHT I had grown out of children's fables long ago, but obviously not. Of the ten tales collected by Vikram Seth in Beastly Tales, eight are traditional fables from China, India, Greece and the Ukraine, retold in his own delightful verse. Two, also in verse, are his own.

Calling them children's fables doesn't do them justice - these tales will delight old and young alike.

My favourite is the Chinese story The Mouse And The Snake. A cruel snake eats a tiny mouse - whereupon the mouse's wife sets out for revenge. Every time the snake tries to crawl into his hole, she buries her teeth in the tip of his tail until, exhausted, the snake spits out her husband.

The epic struggle was seen by a passer-by, who told it to a poet friend, who wrote an elegiac poem The Faithful Mouse to celebrate the tiny creature's victory. But this magical tale ends with a typically Chinese douche of cold water.

The poet of The Faithful Mouse, Seth writes, "in couplets sad and stoic, Celebrates her acts heroic -, Acts that prove that shock and pain, Death and grief are not in vain -, Which fine lines, alive or dead, Neither of the mice has read."

Glorious stuff. Beautifully bound in hardback and illustrated with marvellous colour drawings by Meilo So, this will make a wonderful Christmas gift for young and old.

Also re-released in paperback is Three Chinese Poets, translations by Seth of works by three of China's greatest poets from the Tang dynasty more than 1,000 years ago. Much of the beauty of these poems is lost in translation, but they still give a glimpse into the period of China's greatest splendour, at a moment when it was poised to descend yet again into the chaos of civil war.

Stephen Lewis