Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials or The Earthsea Books by Ursula Le Guin or Raising the Stones by Sheri S. Tepper. They are books I have read many, many times, and which inspire me to be a better writer and to be a better person …

What were your five favourite books as a teenager?

Let me see if I can name only five …

The Lord of the Rings, of course. I love it because it is such a completely imagined world with history, poetry, songs, language, maps. I particularly love the tender and very deep friendship between Frodo and Sam. But perhaps more than all else, I love Tolkein’s physical descriptions of the natural world. Of glades and rivers and vales …

Z for Zachariah, which was written by Robert C. O’Brien but published posthumously in 1973. I love the main character’s simplicity and courage and the beautiful dark descriptions of the end of the world, and the suggestion of hope in her courage.

The Chronicles of Narnia were very important to me. The books resonated very strongly with my own struggle to think about how I fitted or did not fit into the world. Of course I spent half my life trying to find the door into Narnia.

Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting was a great favourite of mine. I loved his grumpiness and his brilliance and longed with all my heart for such a mentor. And of course, best of all, I loved his ability to talk to animals, which I longed to be able to do.

The Land of Far-Beyond was a book that affected me profoundly. Written by Enid Blyton, it is loosely modelled on John Bunyan’s The Pilgrims Progress. Both are allegories, or narratives, with a moral meaning, and they revolve around a journey that is spiritual as well as physical – a journey from sin to salvation. I read and reread this hundreds of times as a child, not so much because I loved the story as because I realised that it was doing what I was trying to do in my stories. I was trying to make inner journeys visible. I was trying to make the intangible tangible.

If you could recommend just one book for everyone to read what would it be?

The Flute Player – DM Thomas’s first published novel and winner of the Gollancz / Guardian Fantasy Prize. This novel emerged out of his fascination with Russian poets, and particularly Anna Akhmatova about whom he also wrote. He created a generic figure, a woman, who preserved the truth of the world while chaos reigned all around her. He didn’t want to individualise the characters too much, so there is very little dialogue in this novel. For me, it tells me what I am and what I want to be. I carry this book everywhere I go in the world, wherever I live.

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements