And then there is storytelling in its most simple and yet most luscious and decadent form - picture books. Open a truly great picture book and you can almost feel the magic rubbing on to your fingertips as you turn the pages. Like stepping through a portal, a great picture book can transport a child into caves and swamps or skies and forests.

It can have them (and you) tasting cherry pie with a caterpillar or wrestling a doormat with a wombat. It can remind you, in the purest, most simple form, of the healing power of a few carefully chosen words on a page and how a great drawing can take you away faster than a magic carpet. And there's nothing like sharing a great book with others. So excuse me while I play Oprah for a moment. Do I have a book for you!

Last year I was enamoured with the wit and charm of Matt Dray's Dougal The Garbage Dump Bear. With Dougal safely tucked away on my shelf, I'm here to fill you in on another must-have, gob-smacking, this-is-destined-to-be-a-favourite children's book. It's called What The Sky Knows by Nike Bourke and Stella Danalis.

It's been described as a dreamer's journey through the landscape; a book of curiosity and wonder and imagination. Put it this way; if it were a song, this book would be Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds. It's that magical. On each page, Bourke and Danalis take readers on an adventure during which they swing on an elephant's tail, lounge on lollipops and make rain pour from the sky. It seems perfectly fitting to learn that What The Sky Knows originally was a homemade birthday present for one of Bourke's four children.

"The book was a gift for IndyaRose's birthday and, as such, was strongly based on her fascination with the natural world at the time," says Bourke, 36, a university lecturer at Q.U.T. "Like most small children, IndyaRose spoke about things like the earth, the wind, the stars and moon as if they were people - just as mysterious and unknowable and fascinating and human as grown-ups. So really, this is her book more than mine, filled with her three-year-old vision of the universe."

Having originally illustrated the story herself, both Bourke and her editor, Leonie Tyle, knew that only a professional artist could do justice to the story. Enter renowned artist and illustrator Stella Danalis.

Danalis's work has appeared from covers of novels to The Australian Financial Review. Still, it's startling to hear that, like Bourke, best known for her dark début novel, The Bone Flute, this is also Danalis's first foray into picture books. What is even more interesting is that Danalis, 38, was given total freedom on the project.

Bourke is the first to admit that Danalis's eclectic illustrations are vastly different to the originals. So how hard was it for her to allow another person's vision into her story? Bourke says it was actually liberating. "There's something quite fascinating about seeing what visions your words inspire in another person. I am quite breathtaken by how Stella has taken those tiny, spare words and grown them into such a colourful, vivid and lively visual feast."