children's books  Elizabeth Laird's top 10 books about tough
stuff from out there  The Kite Runner The Kite Runner: 'You may
have seen the film but that's no reason not to read this
wonderful novel'. Photograph: PR  "What does a good novel do for
you? Make you laugh? Make you cry, gasp, clutch the pages, miss
your stop on the bus? Well, yes. All of those things. But I like
a novel that also illuminates a corner of the real world that I
hardly knew existed, and brings it to life.  Good historical
novels do that. Geoffrey Trease hard-wired ancient Greece into
my imagination and Rosemary Sutcliff did the honours for Roman
Britain. But some novels work the same magic for the world as it
is today. They teleport us to live for a while in distant places
we only hear about on the news. It's a risky business, and
history might frown on some of these interpretations, but the
dramatic stories they tell are every bit as poignant, exciting
and memorable as the most action-soaked fantasies. In a world
where ignorance of Ou