Water in every direction, one white tower, and a light that has to go on tonight whatever the weather is doing. Sophie Blackall's 2018 picture book puts a keeper and his family out on that rock and then lets the seasons arrive: wind, fog, ice drifting past the windows, one kind of day handing over to the next.

Blackall wrote and illustrated it, and she built the words and the pictures to carry different halves of the same job. The text stays short and steady, so you can read it aloud at the pace the pages want. Everything else lives in the art, which holds the sea's constant changing against the tower's refusal to change at all. Small domestic business keeps it human: water on for tea, the wick trimmed and lit, the day set down in the logbook in the keeper's own hand.

It won the 2019 Caldecott Medal for those illustrations, and the pictures reward a slow turn, which suits a child who wants to stop and look. Good for children who like boats, weather and grown-ups with jobs to do. Good for the adult holding the book, who gets a calm ten minutes and something worth looking at while the reading happens.