Following on the heels of the recent announcement about a Sandman prequel, it has come out that Neil Gaiman has been signed for five books for HarperCollins aimed at a younger readership.

The writer of several successful projects including Coraline, Stardust and last year’s Doctor Who episode The Doctor’s Wife will be putting out three children’s books and two picture books as part of the deal.

Not much has been revealed about the books in question yet, but it is known that one of the children’s books is a sequel to Odd And The Frost Giants, and another is called Fortunately, The Milk. Fans could have hours of fun coming up with ways to finish that sentence: “Fortunately, the milk was not off and George was able to enjoy a nice milkshake” or “fortunately the milk acted as a useful salve until an ambulance could be called”.

One of the picture books is about a panda called Chu (hence the title, Chu’s Day) with a big sneeze. One hopes the second one is about Chu deciding to steal a train, just for the possible titles alone.

Unsurprisingly, the actually-quite-lethal-in-the-wild bear runs into all sorts of things likely to exacerbate his sneezing problem. Appropriately the bear somehow wanders into a library which is full of dusty books, a diner which has pepper in the air (“honey, you’ll never believe what I saw at lunch today…”) and an animal-heavy circus. Presumably these people have never heard of “animal control”.

You or a small child can read Chu’s first adventure from January 8th, 2013.

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