Online you can find dozens of testimonials from grown-ups who’ve bought it for a child and then bagged another copy for themselves. If you struggle with the conflicting emotions of Christmas – or of life in general, this simple fable about a pixie who always tells the truth, will not only make you smile but probably make you cry. It's readable in a single sitting and somehow, in those ten minutes, the world can seem a little more navigable than before. For author Matt Haig, Last Boxing Day didn't start well. He was having a "bad morning" as he told The Guardian. He'd shared his struggles with depression and anxiety with millions in his No.1 bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive and more recently Notes on a Nervous Planet . And so again, he put pen to paper and to cheer himself up, he wrote a story for his children. If you buy one more book this year, make it The Truth Pixie , which has sold more than 50,000 copies since publication in October and is now an audiobook read by Olivia Colman, with profits going to Unicef. It has the simple charm of Winnie the Pooh, the lyrical genius of The Gruffalo, the wisdom of Solomon and might just lift you out of a troubled mood.

Truth Pixie What we can all learn from The Truth Pixie

Eventually, she meets a little girl (skip this paragraph if you don't want to know what happens), who is beset by worries for the future: will her grandma die? Will she have to move away from all her friends? Will her family have enough money? Truth Pixie doesn’t shield her from reality, but tells her honestly that life can be hard and uncertain, but that she is a fighter, that ‘bad stuff has goods bits too,’ and ‘the bad days are the days that make you, you’. If that all sounds a bit woo-woo, it isn’t. As my coach, the neuroscientist Dr Magdalena Bak-Maier tells me, when we’re confused or upset and react in an extreme way or if someone pushes our buttons, we should ask ourselves, “how old is that part of you?”. Often it can be traced to a time in childhood where there’s still a vulnerable little you, whose needs weren’t met and who is crying out to be scooped up by your wise adult self. Your Truth Pixie. (Magdalena's one-day retreats specialise in helping you do this You're welcome).