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Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is a riverbank classic for 8 year olds about a Mole who flings down his brush one spring morning and never looks back.
Mole has been spring-cleaning all morning. He's got whitewash in his fur and an aching back. So he says "Bother!" and "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolts out of his burrow into the sunshine. Who hasn't felt like that?
He wanders until he finds something he's never seen before. A river. And on the other bank, a twinkle in a dark hole turns out to be the Water Rat.
Ratty rows him across in his little blue and white boat and announces that there's nothing half so much worth doing as messing about in boats. Then he produces a picnic basket so full that Mole begs him to stop listing what's in it.
It's the gentlest start imaginable. The two of them become friends in an afternoon (after Mole grabs the oars, shows off and tips them both in the river).
And then there's Toad. Toad lives in the grandest house on the river. He's boastful and completely unable to stick at anything. He's already been through sailing, punting and a houseboat. Now it's a shiny yellow caravan, and he talks Mole and Ratty into a trip on the open road.
It doesn't end well for the caravan. A motor car roars past and sends it into a ditch, and Toad just sits in the road in a happy trance. He's found his new obsession. You can see the trouble coming a mile off, and that's half the fun.
Reading it now, you notice how much Grahame's animals feel like people you know. Ratty is kind and a bit bossy. Mole is eager and a bit hopeless. Toad is exhausting and impossible not to like.
This is the full text, not a simplified version. The sentences are long and the language is old-fashioned (there's a "gipsy caravan" and talk of "baccy"). So at this age it works best read aloud, a chapter at a time, with you doing the voices.
When Mole ventures into the Wild Wood alone in winter, it gets properly spooky. Little faces watch him from holes and whistling follows him through the trees. A child who's scared of the dark might want you close for that bit.
If your reader loves animals in coats and jackets having adventures in the English countryside, try the Beatrix Potter Illustrated Collection. It starts with Peter Rabbit, who loses his new blue jacket in Mr. McGregor's garden after being told not to go in.
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