I have two young children. They sometimes ask enormous questions. Not just “why is the sky blue?”, but “where did everything come from?”
I went looking for books that could answer those questions — books that captured the real wonder of life, the universe, and the human story. I found many charming stories and beautifully illustrated picture books, but very few that treated children as serious thinkers, capable of grasping the sweep of deep time. Very few that showed them the breathtaking truth that they are part of a story 13.8 billion years in the making.
Modern cosmology tells us that the atoms in our bodies were forged in ancient stars — a fact beautifully explained by scientists like Carl Sagan and Brian Cox. Evolutionary biology shows us that every living thing on Earth shares a common ancestry, as Charles Darwin first described. Physics, chemistry, geology, anthropology — together they form a single, interconnected narrative. And yet for young children, that story is rarely told as one continuous journey.
That is why I created The Journey of the Stone.
It is a 60-book interconnected series that begins before the Big Bang and travels step by step through the formation of stars, the emergence of life, the age of dinosaurs, the rise of humanity, and the building of the modern world. The core message is simple: to show children they are part of the greatest story ever told.
Show children they are part of the greatest story ever told
Beyond the science and history, however, there was something more urgent driving me. There is so much that is extraordinary about the digital world, and screens are mesmerising. I understand how strongly these forces will shape my children’s lives as they grow older. But before that happens, I want to root their imaginations in something deeper — the miracles of reality itself.
The night sky, the first spark of life, the strange branching tree of evolution, the unbroken chain of ancestors stretching back through time — all of it is real, and all of it is connected. Everything came from stardust, including them. There is a direct line of ancestry from every child back through human history, through ancestors who were children just like them, who experienced every stage of history that has brought us to now.
That sense of connectedness matters. Developmental psychologists such as Jerome Bruner have shown that narrative is one of the primary ways children organise experience and construct meaning. Research in cognitive science consistently shows that children build understanding most effectively when information is embedded in coherent stories rather than presented as isolated facts. A sweeping narrative framework provides a scaffold on which later knowledge can hang.
But for that framework to take root, it must be joyful and alive. It must feel playful, imaginative and full of wonder — even when it is scientifically accurate. These books are not textbooks; they are stories, often told through the eyes of children learning and discovering just as humanity once did. The goal is not simply to transfer knowledge, but to cultivate wonder — because wonder, shared between parent and child, may be one of the most powerful educational forces we have.