A Mother’s Day gift that comes from your child

Flowers are gone in a fortnight and breakfast in bed is cleared away by lunchtime. A book in which your child is the narrator stays out, and gets read again in five years, when the child no longer remembers having said any of it.

That is the point: the voice in the book is the child’s, even though you fill in the form. So give it a few real details. The sentence she says every morning, the sound you recognise her by on the stairs, what happens when somebody is upset. Without those you get a pleasant book about mothers in general.

Check which date applies to you. In the UK and Ireland it is Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent, which falls in March. In the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Singapore and Hong Kong it is the second Sunday in May. Mexico keeps 10 May whatever the weekday, and the United Arab Emirates use 21 March. The British date is the earliest of them, so order sooner than a guide written for an American audience will tell you.

Not every family has one mother, and the book does not have to pretend otherwise. There is a storyline for two mothers or a stepmother, and one for grandmother, who is quietly skipped on the day even though she is somebody’s mother too.

The book takes about half an hour to make and you see it immediately in a free preview, page by page. Only when it is right does it go to print, arriving within eight working days. Count back roughly two weeks from whichever date applies.