Susan Green

“Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”
The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and then, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death; and during that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing-room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream as she usually was.

I first read The Leopard in 1975 (a half century ago! a whole world away!) when it was a set text for HSC English Literature. From the very first paragraph (above), I was in love.
With everything. With the Prince and his family, who we see first at prayer in their frescoed room surrounded by painted Roman gods and goddesses – ‘thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus’ and a mob of minor deities. With Sicily, which is a protagonist in its own right; the heat, the langour, the lavish beauty and cruelty, the history of invasion and colonisation, the decay. And most of all with the writing; its rhythm, its parade of semi-colons (which my own editors have always wanted to remove), its complex, flowing, allusive and beautiful sentences and paragraphs that weave an instant time-travelling spell. I am there, in May 1860, at the Villa Salina near Palermo.

Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, is the ‘Leopard’ of the title, around whom the novel revolves.

…(the Prince) had risen to his feet; the sudden movement of his huge frame made the floor tremble, and a glint of pride flashed in his light-blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both humans and their works.

He is a conundrum of a man. Half-German, half-Sicilian, tall, huge and fair among his slighter, dark-haired kin, see-sawing between sensuality and intellect. He can be irascible, sentimental, intellectual, cynical, philosophical, melancholic, inattentive to practical matters and also ruthlessly pragmatic. He rules his family like  Zeus over Olympus – he loves them, they fear him –  but with the end of the Bourbon regime, the influence of his class is about to wane. The novel follows the Prince as he negotiates, with melancholy realism, the new reality ushered in by the unification of Italy. His class, he knows, must fade into irrelevance as the middle class supplants them.

I only just found out that there’s a 6-part Netflix series out soon. I’ve seen the 1963 Visconti film a few times, including once with the ball scene restored to its full 50-minutes.  American actor Burt Lancaster played the Prince, with Frenchman Alain Delon as his nephew Tancredi and Italian Claudia Cardinale his nouveau riche fiancee Angelica. It seemed perfectly cast. Can I bear to watch the new version?

I can certainly re-read The Leopard and know my expectations will be met. After fifty years and a lot of other reading, it remains in my mind a near perfect novel. And I could say perfect, but won’t for fear of provoking those gods of di Lampedusa’s.

I found a couple of Kathleen Norris collections on Kindle, each containing a half dozen or so novels, and very cheap.

Which is good, because after reading The Heart of Rachael and The Beloved Woman I’ve really gone off this writer.
Though she was an admirable trailblazer in many ways – a best-selling female author, socially and politically aware, a pacifist, supporting votes for women, committed to assisting families living in poverty –  she was also a devout Catholic. Which meant she was passionately opposed to divorce and to birth control, and used her books to promote her conservative views. One of her early books, Mother, even captured the attention of the President, Theodore Roosevelt, for its pro-family (large families, that is) message. The Heart of Rachael contains several full-on rants which seem to blame women for what Norris sees as the moral decline of the age. The Beloved Woman, while not quite as blatant, contrasts the pure, happy, wholesome working-class family with a miserable lot of decadent rich folks. There’s a pretty sickening denouement where the heroine, after having her head turned by a caddish married man, stages a dramatic last-minute reconciliation with her frankly cloddish husband. She renounces a massive inheritance, accompanies him West for work and vows to be a dear little housewife and helper in future.

The other reason I’ve gone off Kathleen Norris is because of her support for America First. We’re hearing that phrase these days on the lips of Donald Trump, but originally the America First Committee was a highly influential pressure group, active 1940-41, dedicated to keeping America out of WWII in Europe. One of its most famous members was the aviator Charles Lindbergh, who was openly a Nazi sympathiser. To see a photo of Kathleen Norris on a stage in Madison Square Garden, next to Lindbergh, giving what appears to be a Nazi salute, is off-putting, that’s for sure.

In the last days of January I also read Crypt by Professor Alice Roberts. Subtitled Life, Death and Disease in the Middle Ages and Beyond, it was not a comforting book. However, I learned a lot about ethnic cleansing in Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Black Death, leprosy, the establishment of  hospitals after the Norman invasion, the destruction of Becket’s shrine at Canterbury and the remarkably robust bones of the English archers who drowned when Henry VIII’s prized ship, the Mary Rose, sank. The facts that have stayed with me are few, sadly – can I blame the hot weather? – but I will always remember that I can only catch leprosy from other human beings and from banded armadillos, and that the Mary Rose had a brother ship, called the Peter Pomegranate.

Both these facts are now tucked away in the trivia department of my brain –  forever.

The Sicilian summer was bringing out the abs and pecs again. It would once more reduce all movements to the consistency of molasses while enervating people with the sirocco, plague the countryside with tiger mosqitoes and forest fires, and make people closet themselves behind their shutters more suspiciously than usual. But summer belongs to Sicily like mountains to Switzerland. It’s only during the long, hot months from May to October that the island is entirely at ease with itself, rediscovering its rhythm like a cat that has strayed and found its way home again. Summer would also bring mulberry granita, silken nights filled with promise and the scent of jasmine, and days bathed in the sand-coloured light of which you can never get enough. The coffee would again taste as it does nowhere else – in fact, everything would again taste like the very first time, for that is the Sicilian summer’s hypnotic trick; everything feels pristine, over and over again,

‘Auntie Poldi’ is Isolde Oberreiter, a 60ish Bavarian widow who retires to her late husband’s home town of Torre Archirafi in Sicily. She fully intends to to drink herself to death while taking in the glorious view. Fortunately, despite depression, sadness and excessive drinking, slowly but surely her formidable life force reasserts itself.  Instead she finds many, many reasons to stay this side of the grave. They include new friends, her husband’s family, the manly and attractive Commissario Vito Montana, plus wine, grappa, prosecco and solving crimes.

The plots are insanely complicated, as is Poldi herself. She’s lusty, bold, clever, crazy, annoying, changeable, ridiculous and adorable. She wears a huge black wig (and claims that Amy Winehouse borrowed her hairstyle), has a wardrobe full of incredible clothes and a thing for perving at traffic cops.

Sicily herself is quite a character as well. I loved the long, lush, lavish descriptions, the detours and digressions into Sicilian history, folklore,  food, crime (the mafia, of course), lifestyle and character.  Auntie Poldi’s adventures are narrated by her nephew, a stitched-up and timid would-be writer who travels from Munich each month to spend a week or two ‘keeping an eye’ on Poldi, working on his turgid family saga and inevitably getting caught up in Poldi’s schemes.

I’ve just read the first three  – Sicilian Lions, Fruits of the Lord and The Handsome Antonio –  in quick succession, and the bonkers plots have now amalgamated into a whirl of hair-raising sleuthing expeditons via Vespa involving mafiosi, real estate, pheromones, vineyards, decaying palazzo, ancient villages, psychics (a beautiful woman, an ugly man, a spooky child), a priest, a Finnish heavy metal band, a palm-tree growing magnate, corrupt practices in water supply, a quarry, several grisly murders, quite a lot of mature-aged sex and I can’t think what else but there’s LOTS.

Though I’ve got another one on the shelf, I need a little breather. One more book would be like having pasta al nero, spigole in agrodolce, pepata di cozze, lumache in salsa di pomodoro, calimaretti fritti, insalata di arance e finocchio selvatico, caponata siciliana, parmagiana alla Teresa, an expresso, half a dozen cannoli and a gelato al limone, all at the one sitting.

However (from the ridiculous to the sublime?) the Poldi books have given me a bit of a yen to re-read The Leopard by Guiseppe di Lampedusa…

A mother, father and daughter living in an inner-urban house in a state of perpetual renovation. A visiting grandmother. And a little mini-lop rabbit.

These are the protagonists of The Burrow, a short novel set in Melbourne during the final days of the pandemic, when restrictions were lifting but the sense of tension and isolation had not yet lifted. It’s five years since baby Ruby died, and the whole family is drifting, stuck, living together but coming apart. Jin and Amy, the parents, live separate lives, while ten-year-old Lucie is quietly struggling with anxiety and intrusive images of trauma and death.

As the novel begins, the father, Jin, has just bought a baby rabbit in an attempt to cheer  Lucie. At around the same time, Pauline, Amy’s mother, comes to stay while recovering from a fall. The rabbit could be seen as a symbol of  vulnerability, I suppose, and growth, and finally, hope. But Fiver – named after a creature in Watership Down by Richard Adams – is as well observed in all its rabbitty ways as the other characters. Fiver and Pauline act as catalysts for change as Lucie bonds with them both. By the end of the novel, there’s been a shift, and their lives can begin to move again. More than that,  there’s hope.

This is a short (yay!), tender, reserved book. Cheng gently probes rather than thrashes out these big issues, using the alternating viewpoints of the four main characters. I enjoyed the delicacy and reserve of the writing.  Cheng explores so much about modern life, not just the effect of the pandemic. Loneliness and isolation, grief and guilt, the complexities and contradictions of love. For all that, it doesn’t seem like a heavy book; Chen has a delicate touch.

How good to discover a new writer! I’ve already ordered her other two books. Room for a Stranger and Australia Day, from the library.

Off the blocks and running in the 2025 Reading Stakes. I’ve finished 3 books so far this year – all fiction, and one of them was even a recent, Australian, literary fiction title. A good start, since I struggled with literary fiction last year.

Last year! It was so horrifying in the big bad world, with the general enshittification of everyday life for us here in Oz, and overseas the violence and horror of war, and a global posse of wannabe strong men doing their usual smash and grab and lie and bullshit with no shame… Sorry, ranting. I am trying to say that unapologetic comfort reading has become my …well, my comfort.

There’s a small pile of sure-fire novels that work that magic, opening a door into a place of well being and familiarity and  pleasure and forgetfulness. Pride and Prejudice is one of them, and the Damerosehay books of Elizabeth Goudge. The Sarah Kelling/Max Bittersohn crime novels by Charlotte Mcleod. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons and The Republic of Love by Carol Shields. And Margaret Yorke by Kathleen Norris.

I’ve written about Kathleen Norris (1880-1966) before, way back in 2016. She was the bestselling American author in her day, with a staggering output of close to 90 novels, plus short stories, journalism and feature articles. Margaret Yorke belonged to my Nan; it was on the shelf with a dozen or so mild romances from the 1910’s to the 1930s, and from the age of about 12, I was allowed to take them home, one at a time, to read. My favourites were Margaret Yorke and Jemima Rides by British writer Anne Hepple. I tried Jemima a couple of years ago, and the spell had been broken; her naivety, which I think is supposed to be piquant and charming, now seems simply idiotic. But Margaret Yorke still does the trick.

First published in 1931, it’s set in an enclave of wealthy Californians who live in lovely houses surrounded by lovely gardens near San Mateo, not far from San Francisco. They have maids and cooks, chauffeurs and nannies, social secretaries – and companions.

Margaret is one of those. She’s a reserved, thoughtful, conscientious young woman with a mystery in her past, and the perfect employee for faded Mrs Cutting. Mrs Cutting is a wealthy widow with an adopted toddler son, and a handsome, charming and thoroughly decent nephew, Stan, who runs the family lumber company. Of course, Stan and Margaret are increasingly attracted to each other. But (again, of course) Margaret has made a mistake in her late teens, a disastrous marriage, and she can’t move forward. Their relationship develops against a background of country club, bridge games and trips to the family ranch; the two characters come to know and respect each other, growing in maturity and understanding until they deserve their happy ending.

A pretty standard romance, actually. So what do I find so comforting about it? It’s the mesmerising flow of description, of adjectives and nouns in the service of clothes, food, gardens, faces, bodies. Margaret wears ‘a thin old white muslin with an untrimmed leghorn hat’ to walk around the milking sheds on the farm. On a hot afternoon, ‘a dark soft flowered gown in dull blue and brown; it was almost transparent, it was limp and soft, and seemed just fitted to the heat and brilliance of the day’. In the evening, ‘a frail black lace gown that made her gypsy coloring more brilliant than ever’ with ‘old gold and enamel earrings dangling almost to her shoulders’.

Not only do I want to ransack her wardrobe, I’d like to shove her out of the way at the dinner table, join her in a wicker chair in the drowsy autumn garden among bees and flowers or in the shaded cement swimming pool on a breathless hot summer morning. I want to ride in the limousine or the roadster and take tea (wearing a dotted swiss dress, a close-fitting navy blue hat and small pearls in my ears) at a fancy San Fransisco hotel.

Moreover, I want to waft through my days with nothing more to worry about than my beastly husband whose divorce from me is not legal though he thinks it is, who married and divorced and then re-married the devious flirt who was engaged to Stan but ran off with a married older man who died of a heart attack, and doesn’t know that my employer’s adopted son is his. And mine. Are you with me? Oh, did I forget to mention that he (beastly husband) is the child of her (employer’s) second cousin and they share the same lawyer? And that the devious flirt is engaged to Stan (again)?

Yes, there are plot twists and turns in an improbable Days of Our Lives manner but if you don’t think about it, it holds together. Almost. So it’s just as well the plot is the least important element of the book. I can read Margaret Yorke again and again and simply lose myself in the sensual fantasy. It’s sheer, blissful, undemanding, reliable comfort.

While waiting for Kate Constable’s annual reading roundup, I thought I’d attempt my own. My record-keeping is not great, but with the help of this blog, the history on my library account, book group lists and a look at my bookshelves…here it is. Sorry, no pie charts.

Grand total is 110 books. I think it’s probably a bit more; I vaguely remember a few stray novels and thrillers  borrowed from friends or bought from the Op Shop on holiday. And I haven’t included books I didn’t read properly. If I lost patience and then skipped to the end, they don’t count.

So, in order:

Biography and memoir 23
Children’s and YA 21
Crime/Espionage 20
Literary fiction 14
History 10
Health, psychology, human behaviour 9
Bestsellers of Yesteryear 6
Literary criticism 4
Miscellaneous 3

I’m surprised and also not surprised; two books a week, more or less, sounds about right, since I can polish off a children’s novel in a couple of hours, and a crime novel in a day.

This little accounting project has made me examine my reading habits. It’s obvious that I do more in winter. Short days, long evenings, rain and cold. Because of dodgy wrists, I can’t knit as much as I used to, so that’s upped the score. I don’t watch much television, either. We do stream a few shows, but there’s not a lot of bingeing. And as a retired person, I have plenty of time.

But, I’m also a gardener, and I would have thought there’d be A LOT less reading action in the milder weather, but not so. I am, let’s face it, just a reading fool!

Which books have stayed with me? I’ve chosen one for each category.

The Rescuers by Margery Sharp, for the sheer pleasure and delight of a sophisticated, witty, exciting, funny and altogether delightful children’s junior novel. With wonderful Garth Williams illustrations. Sheer joy.

Windswept by Annabel Abbs. I think I’ve come to the end of my ‘women walking’ phase,but this one I plan to re-read. I enjoyed the way Abbs linked these women, some famous, some not, to her own landscapes and trails and weather and family and life experiences.
One of the more graceful (as in not clunky, not strained) examples of the genre.

Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald. A new writer for me. Reading joy! Perfect,short, witty, moving, and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful language.

The Slough House novels of Mick Herron provided more reading joy, though of a totally different kind. I’m yet to watch Slow Horses, the series based on the books, because we don’t have Apple. Bloody streaming, why aren’t all the ones I want to watch on the one service?

Unofficial Britain, for sheer mad weirdness. And for alerting me to the possibilities of streets and towns, ruined spaces, building sites, wasteland, edge-land.
As a kid, when I first read Alan Garner’s Elidor, I didn’t like it because it was set in an ugly, blasted urban streetscape, not Alderley Edge like The Weirdstone of Brisengamen. My bias has always been towards country, green, forest, old houses, stone, rivers, hills. Blinkers off!

Hugh McKay’s The Way We Are gave me a lot to think about. It’s on loan to a friend, but I’m going to read it again.

The Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge. I read this one ages ago, and dismissed it as  inferior Goudge, but on giving it another go, I found it deeper and more moving than I’d realised.

My Lit Crit top pick was The Haunted Wood, and as for Miscellaneous, the ‘too hard to classify’ department – The Poetry of Birds, edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee, a  gorgeous anthology picked up from the library book sale. I try to read poetry before I go to sleep a couple of times a week. I haven’t dreamed about birds yet, but when I watch the wrens and spinebills and honeyeaters in the morning, lovely phrases come to mind, by poets I probably would never read. Like Tennyson, from ‘The Throstle’:

‘Summer is coming, summer is coming
I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,’
Yes, my wild little poet.

I will remember this next spring, when the birds are going crazy.

Nearly the end of the year and the start of the next. I love the gap between Christmas and New Year; the week drifts by with no particular plan except to finish the leftovers and relax. Our son and his partner stayed for a few days, but now they’re gone, I am pottering contentedly between the garden, my laptop (my newest interest – family history) and the couch.
Snoozing, of course, and drinking cups of tea – but also reading. I am determined to finish the trio of books I started a week ago. Finished on Saturday was Her Secret Service by Claire Hubbard-Hall, in tandem with Bright Shining by Julia Baird, and now I’m whipping through The Grey Wolf, the latest instalment in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series.

Her Secret Service tells the story of women in the British intelligence services, a group who’ve been written out of official histories and described as ‘secretaries’ or ‘clerks’. I’d been waiting for this to be released. So excited! But while it attempts to set the record straight by detailing the work of these trailblazers, it’s actually a pretty pedestrian read. Many of these women were not doing the cloak-and-dagger stuff but sifting and prioritising enormous amounts of information (as Hubbard-Hall notes, information was ammunition), and Hubbard-Hall struggles to make their work seem compelling. And because there is so little known about them (Official Secrets Act!) she often doesn’t have a lot to work with.  It’s Hubbard-Hall’s first book; I hope she digs in and continues the research because it’s a fascinating subject.

In comparison, Baird is a skillful and polished writer. Bright Shining is one of those hybrid books, a blend of memoir and personal experience, interviews, observations, history, politics and more. She explores issues like reconciliation, ‘Me Too’ and restorative justice to discover the hard-to-define quality of ‘grace’. While sometimes seemed it like a series of loosely connected musings in search of an organising thesis  (what, really, was the point of the anecdote about Napoleon’s penis?), it is beautifully written, never dull, very readable and because I have been enjoying Not Stupid, Baird’s podcast with Jeremy Fernandez, I could hear her voice, talking just to me, as I read.

And The Grey Wolf? Politics, environmental activism, corruption, murder…
After reading the 18 previous Inspector Gamache novels, the disparate conjoined spheres of Montreal policing and the magical Quebec village of Three Pines are so familiar. Perhaps I should have seen out 2024 with something inspiring or meaningful… but given the year we’ve had in the world, some escapist thrills with – I sincerely hope! –  the baddies dealt with and disaster averted seems like a pretty good way to end the year.

In museums, libraries and the landscape, a memory remains of a wilderness of unquiet graves, riddling marshes and storm-beaten cliffs. The stories to come and the commentaries that follow them were inspired by these memories, found in cultural artefacts whose words and images shed light on the idea of the wild in early medieval Britain. I sought to capture flashes of the cruel garnet eyes that wink from the treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial, and the beautiful, haunting atmosphere of the Old English elegies, Welsh englynion and the Irish immrama. These survivals – whether poetic, artistic, carved from whales’s bone or cast in solid gold – were forged by cultures with a world view very different to our own. My aim has been to evoke and contextualise an ancient imaginative landscape.

In Wild: Tales From Early Medieval Britain, Amy Jeffs leads the reader through stories dating from the turbulent period circa 600 to 1000, through a landscape which seems cold, inhospitable and threatening, among people with not just ‘very different’ but almost incomprehensible lives and beliefs. Invasions, migrations and power struggles convulsed early Britain – depending on where a person lived, it was the Celtic Britons, settlers from various Germanic tribes, clans from across the Irish sea warring with the Picts, and of course, the Vikings… And the weather was really, really bad. An ‘ice-encrusted, storm-swept, eel-infested, midnight-sun-illuminated wilderness’.

I was expecting to read, as well as commentary, accessible translations or re-tellings of ancient texts. Instead, Jeffs has created a series of seven tales, combining elements of these texts. Even more unexpected was how visceral, immediate, vivid they are. The first, The Lament of Hos, begins:

Cold it is, cold and so close that I can feel my neighbours against me, their beards and bones rotting like stacks of winter branches. I hear the voices of elves, goblins and old gods that haunt these unhallowed halls. They whisper that I am friendless: that my old companions are dead, that my love has left me forever, that I must hope without hope until I am no more than an ache in the air.

The narrator is a young wife who has been betrayed by her lover, captured by her lord’s kinsmen, executed and thrown into the ‘unhallowed halls’ of a cave or an ancient burial mound where she lives on as a ghost or spirit. It makes me think of those terrifying scenes among the un-dead in The Lord of the Rings. Probably some of the genuine sense of claustrophobia comes from Jeffs’ research. She’s not just rootling around in libraries among Old English tomes; she goes on a caving expedition herself. Only fifteen minutes, crawling around at night under the Mendip Hills in south-west England, but as someone who’s pretty much cave-, cavern- and tunnel-averse, it was a bit too well observed.

What a weird, unsettling and unusual book this is. I mean that as a recommendation! And original wood engravings by the author are an added bonus.

I started reading The Children of Green Knowe by L M Boston for a Substack read-along (first I’ve ever done; will I do a knit-along next?), and immediately entered another world. It’s like being transported into a beautiful old-fashioned snow globe so as well as following Tolly’s adventures in the book, the story doubles so I see myself wandering alone around the castle-cum-house, going with Mr Boggis into the stables and little by little discovering the garden. I know by heart the carved mouse, the rocking horse, the birdcage. I know the topiary deer, the huge stone St Christopher and the laughter and pattering footsteps of the friendly ghost children. And I sit in front of the fire, leaning against Granny Oldknow’s knees, listening to the first story, Toby’s Story…
Which is where I have to stop if I am going to read along with everyone else. It’s such a special book; its magic has never faded with familiarity and I’m looking forward to being part of a little Green Knowe fan club.

The place where we stopped – Tolly, Granny Oldknow and a family story – echoes a project I’ve just started. My mother left a massive stash of family history research and I’ve really only had a superficial look at it. Until now. A friend has been researching her maternal line, regularly updating me on the discoveries and stories of this chain of fore-mothers. She’s following the mitochondrial DNA. After I had lunch with her recently, the bug has bitten, hard. Another friend – bless her! –  is now transcribing Mum’s handwritten pages and I’ve just subscribed to Ancestry.com.

And I’ve been thinking, too, about my own family stories.  As a small child, I used to ask my parents about when they were little. There was the tale of Dad, sick of being bullied, finding a pair of pliers and using them on his brother’s big fat bum. Mum, walking along the (strictly out-of-bounds) railway line and getting her foot stuck in the track. Luckily for my future existence, the train stopped, the driver got out and released her with a severe scolding. Then there were the stories of their parents. Mum’s father running away to sea and Dad’s father (unbelievably, since he was a grim and crusty old chap) playing in a dance band. Going back into the far past, there were tales of blood feuds and romances among Border Scots from Mum, and religious persecution in Silesia (now part of Poland) from Dad. I only half remember most of them, but Mum, amazingly, made a file called ‘Family Myths and Legends.’ She wrote that she couldn’t vouch for the truth of them, but because they were told and re-told for generations, they make part of her heritage. Part of her.

And therefore part of me. There’s a family surname on my mother’s side that has, for six generations, been carried down as a middle name. I forgot about it for my own son, but I know my cousin’s oldest son has it. I’m hoping that Ancestry will shed some light. Who were these people, where were they from and why did they remain so important to their descendants?

But like Mum, I don’t intend to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

The idea that children’s writing is a lower form – a  brain-injured version of writing for adults, as (writer Martin Amis) Amis caricatured it – is as persistent as it is misguided. Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort. It is a platform on which everything else is built. It’s through what we read as children that we imbibe our first understanding of what it is to inhabit a fictional world, how words and sentences carry a style and tone of voice, how a narrator can reveal or occlude the minds of others, and how we learn to anticipate with excitement or dread what’s round the corner. What we read in childhood stays with us.

When I first read a review of Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood in the Guardian’s book pages, I practically drooled (sorry, but you know…book hunger). I knew I would love it. And I did.

In the foreword, Leith lays out his ambitions for the book – in the role of a literary historian, to discuss the books and writers he thinks are important. He does so much more, though; he treats children’s literature seriously. I don’t mean solemnly; Leith doesn’t write as an academic, and the book is wide-ranging, lively and often funny. I loved that he gets just how important books can be to a child, how they can help make your world. And I loved how he digs into the often complex and troubled lives of some of the most influential writers – like JM Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett – to make sense of their work.

The most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who have the most invested in it emotionally. Often, they are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.

If you accept that it deals almost exclusively with British writers (and Leith explains why; he thinks what he calls the British canon has had an outsized influence on the world), it could become a standard text. I could have used it when I was studying for my Graduate Diploma in Children’s Literature. Its great strength – which is that Leith writes about his chosen authors and their work in depth – could also be seen as a weakness, because he’s had to leave out so many (and some of them are my favourites, too*).  But at 578 pages, The Haunted Wood is still a weighty tome. I’m both a reader and a writer of children’s books, so this was a long, luxurious wallow in a subject I love.

*Joan Aiken, for instance. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase was one of the pivotal books of my childhood – I nearly wore it out! – and as an adult, it’s informed my writing for children. And then there’s Penelope Lively, William Mayne, Leon Garfield, John Masefield, Dodie Smith, Mary Norton…