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"What's Your Favourite Book?"

I've read a lot of books, and had a lot of favourites since I was seven (when I'd have said The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe without a second's hesitation). Here is a brief list of a few of the books which mattered most to me while I was growing up. Some of them may be out of print, but they are all worth tracking down. Hopefully I'll be able to write in more detail about some of these authors and their work elsewhere on this site, but for now:

The Nargun and the Stars by Patricia Wrightson

I heard this one on Jackanory in about 1975 and went straight out to buy the book. I read it again thirty years later and it's still great. Like many classic children's stories it has as its hero an orphan, in this case a young Australian named Simon, who loses both parents in a car crash and is sent to live with an aunt and uncle whom he barely knows at their remote farm in the Wongadilla valley. He's sullen, resentful and out-of-place, but slowly he comes to love Wongadilla, and encounters the strange spirits which haunt it; beings from the aboriginal Dreamtime such as the mischievous, frog-like Potkoorok, and the terrifying Nargun, an ancient, predatory being made from living rock, which Simon must help to defeat. There is a real sense of magic here: the Potkoorok is convincingly un-human, and the Nargun, barely sentient but cold and old and hungry, is utterly alien. There something truthful and moving too in Simon's growing relationship with his aunt and uncle. Surprisingly, this doesn't seem to have been available in the UK for many years, but if you can track down a copy I don't think you'll be disappointed.

The Owl Service by Alan Garner

I must have read this book twenty times when I was growing up, but I never quite understood it. I read it again last year, and I'm still not sure. It's like a strange dream, full of things half-glimpsed and meanings which keep slipping out of reach. Like The Nargun and the Stars it tells of modern children (or teenagers) encountering ancient forces. A family spends a summer at an old house in Wales, and their story somehow echoes and becomes entwined with one of the old Welsh legends. A haunting mixture of the inexplicable, the unknowable and the unpronounceable.

The Eagle of the Ninth and Warrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff

...or I could have chosen Knight's Fee, or The Lantern Bearers, or Sun-horse, Moon-horse, or Frontier Wolf... Rosemary Sutcliff is one of my favourite children's authors, and I doubt she ever wrote a bad book, but these were the two I liked best when I was growing up.

The Eagle of the Ninth is set at the height of Roman rule in Britain. Marcus, who arrives as a young centurion imagining a glorious army career ahead of him, is invalided out of the legions after his first skirmish. Barred from the life he had imagined for himself, he sets off on a quest into the untamed wilderness north of Hadrian's Wall to try to retrieve the eagle standard of his father's legion, the 9th Hispana, lost when the 9th was wiped out by hostile tribes some years before. It's a superb adventure story, and it has everything you need in a book about the Romans - battles, gladiators, the lot.

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