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Howard Jacobson on Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
I didn’t fully understand Jonathan Swift’s epic at nine years old – that was why reading it made me feel so free.
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Claire Tomalin on The Tale of Tom Kitten by Beatrix Potter (1907)
This is the first book I remember owning, given to me in 1938 by a nurse in the Homeopathic Hospital where I was being treated for an ear infection.
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Frank Cottrell Boyce on Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (1957)
I curled up on the big chair ready for more stories about these jolly trolls with their magic hats and family picnics. I got something very different.
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Melissa Harrison on The Little Grey Men by B.B. (1942)
A fantasy story about the last gnomes in Warwickshire, it’s a richly detailed, luminous love letter to the English countryside.
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Joe Dunthorne on Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish by Michael Foreman (1972)
When I first picked up this book again after many years, I remembered it only as a fun story about a chap who wants to go to the moon – with dinosaurs. But it’s so much more.
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Ben Okri on Tales from Shakespeare by Charles and Mary Lamb (1807)
Charles and Mary Lamb did something amazing when they retold Shakespeare’s plays for children: they made available to kids like me some of the most moving stories at the heart of a culture.
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Douglas Kennedy on The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (1961)
Norman Juster’s seminal tale is an adventure story about the absolute wonder of learning – and the need to discover and maintain curiosity.
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Marina Warner on The Myths of Greece and Rome by HA Guerber (1907)
The illustrations were almost more indelibly imprinted than the retellings: the frontispiece enthralled me from the moment I opened the book.
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Sarah Hall on Z for Zachariah by Robert C O’Brien (1974)
Robert C O’Brien’s story was unlike anything I’d encountered before, perhaps because it didn’t really seem like a children’s book.
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Isabel Waidner on Eine Woche voller Samstage by Paul Maar (1973)
The Sams series is built around a German linguistic constraint that doesn’t translate: to take the name of each weekday literally and see what that does for the narrative.
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William Boyd on The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling (1894)
Kipling’s stories had an intense allure for me: I too was a boy living, if not in an Indian jungle, then something very close to one in West Africa.
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Erica Wagner on an unknown book of ghosts
A book – a hardback, bound in clear plastic – which I read, and then read again, feeling that fluttering sense of wonder and terror that the best horror brings.