Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The World’s Worst Children | 2016 | David Walliams | Buy |
| 2 | The World’s Worst Children 2 | 2017 | David Walliams | Buy |
| 3 | The World’s Worst Children 3 | 2018 | David Walliams | Buy |
| 4 | The World’s Worst Teachers | 2019 | David Walliams | Buy |
| 5 | The World’s Worst Parents | 2020 | David Walliams | Buy |
The World’s Worst series collects Walliams’ short stories about spectacularly terrible people. Three volumes of The World’s Worst Children (2016-2018) feature stories about dreadful kids, followed by The World’s Worst Teachers (2019) and The World’s Worst Parents (2020).
Each volume contains about ten standalone short stories, making them good for bedtime reading or short car journeys. The humor is broad and physical, with characters who are grotesquely selfish, lazy, or mean in ways that children find hilarious. The World’s Worst Children books established the format, and the Teachers and Parents volumes proved the concept worked beyond just kids.
The five books were published at a pace of one per year from 2016 to 2020, and they sold extremely well in the UK. Tony Ross illustrated all five volumes, and his scratchy, energetic drawings add a lot to the comedy. These collections sit alongside Walliams’ novels and picture books as a distinct strand of his children’s output.