My book is Five Children and It by E. Nesbit, published in 1902. It’s a novel of ‘careful what you wish for’ episodes featuring a family of children – Anthea, Jane, Robert and Cyril and their baby brother, the Lamb (Hilary) – who find a Psammead, an ancient, wish-granting Sand-fairy. There are two further titles with the same characters, The Story of the Amulet, and The Phoenix and the Carpet.

I read and re-read Edith Nesbit’s books in around grade six, at the same time I was also reading Enid Blyton , L.M. Montgomery, Susan Coolidge, C.S. Lewis and Louisa May Alcott – all of whom very obligingly wrote series.

The Puffin paperback had beautiful illustrations from the original edition, by H.R. Millar. Not that I knew it at the time, but Edith Nesbit was a prominent socialist, a founding member of the Fabian Society. Her political views provide a welcome contrast to those of Enid Blyton (writing decades later) when it comes to characters’ attitudes to, for example, gypsies or servants, or gender, for that matter.

I loved Edith Nesbit’s characters, their wonderfully good intentions and fallibility, and the impossible scrapes into which they very reliably got themselves. The characters and their worlds are real to the last detail of dirty handkerchiefs and darned stockings and sibling snipes, and it is into this lovely grimy reality that she places her stories of magic and adventure.

One of the things I can remember being charmed by was that these children so clearly from another era, with their Edwardian pinafores and petticoats, and belted Norfolk jackets, were nonetheless just like me in many respects. They got bored, they lost their tempers, fought with their brothers and sisters, they sulked, food was very important to them, they wished to behave well, but often didn’t, and then tried to make amends, not always successfully.

The adventures in Five Children and It are so logically constructed – there’s a satisfying inevitability to the consequences of the wishes, and yet a complete belief that you the reader would have been equally susceptible to the problems encountered by the children, had you been lucky enough to find a Psammead. Edith Nesbit knows how to apply the narrative clamp and not let her characters off the hook until they’ve learnt something. It helps that the Psammead is such a prickly malcontent, who could not be less interested in providing happy outcomes.

Her inventiveness, warmth, humour and humanity make Edith Nesbit’s books as fresh and readable to me now as they were when I was eleven.

‘Six Impossible Things’ is Fiona’s first book. It was published by Pan Macmillan in 2010, and shortlisted in the 2011 CBCA Awards. For more, visit Fiona’s website: www.fionawood.com

The book I remember most fondly from my childhood would have to be Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first read it, but I must have been quite young because I remember it as being my first ‘big’ book and I also recall feeling a sense of accomplishment, as well as a little amazement, the first time that I managed to make it all the way through to the end. It probably remains the only book from my childhood that I’ve re-read a number of times over the years.

One of the things that made WITW so memorable for me was that it was my first real experience of reading a story that drew me completely in to another world – the world of the woodlands and the riverbank. Right from the start, I really wanted to be there with Ratty and Moley ‘messing about in boats’ and in a way of course, I was. Whenever I reached the end of the story and turned that last page, the magical world of WITW was one that I always regretted having to leave.

But even more than the setting, it was the wonderful cast characters I loved: mild mannered, timid Moley with his hidden strengths; good old, reliable and friendly Ratty; gruff but wise and inspirational Mr Badger; and finally, that loosest of all loose canons, the conceited and incurably over-enthusiastic Mr Toad.

Who would have ever thought that a rat, a mole, a badger and a toad could be so appealing? I think perhaps for me, it was the innate warmth and decency of the characters, particularly Moley and Ratty, along with their loyalty, courage and especially their friendship that I’ve always loved the most. (Although I do acknowledge the fact that it is a very heavily male-dominated cast.)

But what a story! You’d be forgiven for thinking that a tale about a bunch of woodland creatures would be fairly mild and underwhelming. But nothing could be further from the truth. WITW contains among other things: boating mishaps, a caravan road trip, the dangers of the Wild Woods, grand theft auto, multiple car crashes, a house arrest, police chases, a court room drama, a 20 year prison sentence, an escape by a cross-dressing toad, a fugitive on the run, a pitched battle against an army of mansion invading weasels, stoats and ferrets, a lost son and even a mystical encounter with the god Pan! Could you really ask for anything more?

Sometimes when you re-read a favourite book from your youth, it doesn’t quite live up to your memories. Although I’ve not read WITW from beginning to end for many years, when my children Meg and Joe were little one of our family’s favourite videos was a terrific animated musical version of it that we watched repeatedly and always sang along to.

I can’t see WITW with its wonderful depiction of both simple pleasures and grand adventures ever losing its appeal for me. I’m sure I’ll always be drawn to this tale of a trio of unlikely companions who band together in the name of friendship, to save another friend – albeit a wildly incorrigible, ungrateful and pompous one – from himself.

Michael’s most recent book is: Ishmael and the Hoops of Steel (2011) Omnibus Books/Scholastic Australia. For more, see Michael’s blog at www. michaelgerardbauer.wordpress.com.

Just arrived on my doorstep – Steampunk Playing Cards from Theory 11. Magnificent!

Foz made a splash debut in 2010 with ‘Solace and Grief’, and followed it in 2011 with ‘The Key to Starveldt’, both powerful and moving horror/paranormal tales.

From the moment my grandmother gave me the first book as a ninth birthday present, I was hooked on the Redwall series by Brian Jacques, which follows the exploits of various mice, squirrels, otters, moles, shrews, badgers, hares and other woodland creatures attached either to Redwall Abbey or the mountain of Salamandastron. Though aimed at a middle-grade audience, I loved the books so fiercely that I continued to read and re-read them right through to university, so that for nine whole years, they defined and dominated my reading habits.

The series was more than an infatuation: it was a learning curve, though it’s only recently that I’ve recognised it as such. Unusually for a middle-grade author, Jacques never flinched from killing characters – even ones who were very young, very old, or in love – or leaving having them suffer permanent injuries, so that you could never lapse into assuming that everyone you cared about would emerge unscathed. His books were populated by a diverse cast of heroes and heroines in equal measure, with different ideas of strength, courage and competence lauded and explored from volume to volume. History, poetry, puzzles and riddles were always a part of his stories, and if characters’ speech patterns and behaviour were usually defined by species, there were always exceptions to the rule, with an overriding theme of cooperation and solidarity between the animals carrying more narrative weight than an emphasis on their differences.

As a child, the books made me cry on many occasions, and even as an adult, recalling them provokes a similar emotional response. But perhaps most importantly to both my feminist sensibilities as an adult and to the tomboy girl I was, whether he was writing about adventure, love, war, betrayal, redemption, courage, mysteries or comedy, there was always something fiercely egalitarian to Jacques’s work. Because the heroines of Redwall came in all shapes and sizes: there was Hon Rosie, the laughing hare warrior and devoted mother; Lady Cregga Rose-Eyes, a battle-hardened badger berserker who nonetheless lived out her final years as a nurse; the sarcastic and brave nomad squirrel, Russa Nodrey; the kind, inquisitive hedgehog Tansy, who went on to become Abbess of Redwall; the mouse Mariel Gullwhacker, a loving daughter, fierce survivor and roaming adventurer; otter Grath Longfletch, a peerless archer on a revenge quest; and stubborn, quick-witted Laterose, a peaceful mouse who nonetheless fought against slavery.

In so many ways, the Redwall series defined, not just my childhood, but my love of reading. It was the first series I ever became emotionally invested in, yearning desperately after each new book, and though the world wasn’t strictly fantastic, it nonetheless cemented my love of fantasy. As Jacques passed away in early 2011, there will be no more new stories – though from the year I was born to the year he died, he expanded Redwall at almost the rate of a book a year – but the 22 he did write will be with me forever.

Foz’s website is http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com and her most recent book is ‘The Key to Starveldt’.

Kate is the author of  the much  loved ‘The Chanters of Tremaris’ series.

There is a very particular thrill in discovering a book that seems to have been written just for you and nobody else in the world. When I first read Peter’s Room in my early teens, I felt a shock of recognition, and a secret delight so strong that it seemed almost wicked.

The book belonged to my school library, so I could borrow it whenever I wanted to. I didn’t realise how rare and unfashionable all Antonia Forest’s books were to become, or I might have stolen it on my last day. No, seriously. They are almost impossible to find now. You can imagine my joy when, many years later, I actually found another copy — not even in a secondhand bookshop, but with a stack of old paperbacks in a Spanish restaurant in Collingwood. Dear reader, I bought it for three dollars. The cheapest copy I could find on the internet this morning cost fifty seven pounds!

Antonia Forest was an English author, who wrote a series of ten (in my view) criminally under-appreciated school stories and other books featuring the improbably large Marlow family. The first book, Autumn Term, was written in 1948; the last in the series was published in 1982. Slightly weirdly, though the action in the books takes place over only a couple of years in the life of the Marlows, each volume is updated, more or less, to the year in which it was written, so that characters who remember living through the Blitz in the first book are toying with punk by the last. This can make for a disorienting reading experience if you read the series all the way through!

Peter’s Room falls in the middle of the series, and is set during the Christmas holidays at the Marlows’ ancestral farm estate, Trennels. Peter takes possession of the Shippen, a disused outbuilding, and the four younger Marlows, together with their neighbour Patrick Merrick, gather there to create their own version of the Bronte sisters’ invented sagas of Gondal and Angria.

Each of them takes on a character — the young king Jason, Malise, Nicholas, Crispian, Rupert — you can sense the courtly, high romantic flavour of the fantasy by the names they choose! And while developing their joint story, each takes the chance to use their character to express some hidden side of their own personality. Patrick decides, to the outrage of the others, that his Rupert will be a traitor, unable to stand up to the htreat of torture. Nicola, though the most reluctant participant, finds comfort in her Gondal character when she finds her beloved hawk dead on his perch. Ginty and Patrick begin a tentative romance under cover of privately ‘being’ Rupert and Rosina. Lawrie, the actress of the family, relishes the acting-out and is dismayed when the experiment falls apart. And Peter comes to identify so strongly with Malise that it almost costs him his life.

When I first read Peter’s Room, I was the only person I knew of with a strong, private fantasy life, and this was the only book I’d ever come across that captured the intoxicating, secret pleasure of becoming totally absorbed in your own imagined world. Interestingly, it was only on rereading as an adult that I fully absorbed the clear message of the book, that such role-playing and living in one’s imagination is self-indulgent, childish, and dangerous — both physically and emotionally. A message I somehow managed to miss the first time around!

What is going on here? As a writer, I now see myself as a professional daydreamer, and surely Antonia Forest herself was one too. After all, she wrote about the same cast of characters for over thirty years — she must have lived with them, spoken their thoughts, known them better than she knew herself. And Forest’s characters are wonderful — psychologically complex, flawed, attractive, maddening. Don’t tell me she didn’t live in an imaginary world! In real life, she was an only child, fascinated by large families. Were the Marlows the family she’d invented to keep herself company? I can’t help believing that someone who could write so convincingly and with such insight into the attractions of fantasising, knew first-hand how seductive those delights could be. Perhaps she feared being sucked in too deep, as the Marlows are; perhaps she knew exactly what that felt like. I guess we’ll never know (Antonia Forest died in 2003).

Anyway, Peter’s Room was my first evidence that other people knew about real imagining — imagining so hard that it felt as if that was your true life, not getting up and brushing your teeth and going to school; knowing that your ‘pretend’ self was your real self, not the dull everyday person that everyone else saw. It was the first time I’d felt really, secretly, wholly understood. It was written just for me.

Kate’s latest book is Crow Country (Allen & Unwin 2011). For more, visit her blog at http://kateconstable.blogspot.com/

16% of people think a placebo was a government official in ancient Sumer.

4% of ants are actually small sticks.

8% of people have no nail on their little toes.

14% of Renaissance painters were allergic to cheese.

28% of people have faces that cannot be caricatured by cartoonists.

71% of directions given by strangers are wrong in either direction or duration.

5% of Monopoly games are played strictly by the rules.

94% of clouds aren’t any shape at all, really.

12% of economists worship the Great White Sow.

77% of meetings are too long, 22% are pointless.

44% of cats can’t smile.

23% of politics makes no sense at all to anyone.

2% of traffic lights are telepathic and change to red just to spite you.

88% of items marked ‘Handwash only’ are thrown in the washing machine.

Justin  is the author of over 30 books for children and young adults, including the hugely popular Extreme Adventures series.

I grew up in a house of books – well, three houses really, since the family moved twice as it grew larger; and the books went with us, of course.  There’s a black and white photo of me, aged about 2, posing in front of our old blue Kombi during one of those moves. The rear of the Kombi is stacked with books.

Although you can’t see their covers, somewhere in that 1950s mobile library are the two Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling. I had the good luck, several years and one house-move later, to share a bedroom with my two elder brothers. Billy was a keen reader and an even keener story-teller, and often after lights-out he would recount to Philip and me a second-hand version of what he’d been reading that day. And this is how I first became acquainted with Mowgli’s wolf pack, with Shere Khan the tiger, with Baloo, Bagheera and Kaa; and with (always my favourite) that brave little mongoose, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

When I was old enough to read the stories myself, I rediscovered the Jungle Books through Kipling’s own voice and those of his characters – and enjoyed them all over again. And I still do. I have a 1932 hardback copy of The Two Jungle Books , still with its slip jacket,  that I found in a Sunday market 12 months ago and which I dip into from time to time.  But in my heart, I still enjoy Billy’s version best.

Justin’s  latest book is ‘Mission Fox, Horse Hijack’ from Puffin 2011. Find out more by visiting Justin’s website: www.justindath.com