JACQUELINE WILSON

Best-selling children’s author

. ..are you reading now?

BIG Sky by Kate Atkinson. I think she’s a wonderful novelist, but I’m especially fond of the Jackson Brodie novels. He’s an endearing, rueful private investigator whose own domestic life has been turbulent.

He endures various violent attacks on his person in the five books in which he features, although by the end of each he’s managed to solve the crimes he’s been investigating.

But these aren’t crime novels — they’re glorious literary novels, bursting with believable characters with distinct personalities, especially the children and the dogs.

There are heartbreaking situations to make you weep, and such witty description you snort with laughter. When you finish one Jackson Brodie novel you want to reread them all. I have a loveable scruffy rescue dog. What else could I call him but Jackson?

. . .first gave you the reading bug?

I LEARNT to read when I was five-and-a-half. When I was given the first of Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books, The Enchanted Wood, I couldn’t stop turning the pages, discovering the Magic Faraway Tree alongside Jo, Bessie and Fanny (now renamed Frannie!).

I fell in love with Silky the elf, with her golden hair and her Pop Biscuits that filled your mouth with honey. I wanted to visit the land of birthdays again and again, though I could never decide whether to wish for silver wings that could fly or a walking, talking doll with her own wardrobe of clothes.

It’s been fashionable for decades to wince at Enid Blyton’s writing style and snobbishness, but she certainly knew how to make children love reading.

. . . would you take to a desert island?

I’D WANT something long and engrossing, so I’d choose David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I’ve read my tattered paperback maybe five times already.

My father read the first few chapters to me when I had measles as a child. He couldn’t bear my favourite Faraway Tree books so turned to Dickens in desperation.

I had to concentrate hard but I gradually became enthralled.

Each time I re-read David Copperfield I hear the long-ago, even tones of my father’s voice, and I’m a little girl again, delighting in the eccentric behaviour of Betsey Trotwood, loving the cosiness of the Peggotty passages, wishing I could live in the black barge house on the Yarmouth sands and longing for a blue bead necklace like Little Em’ly.

. . .left you cold?

THE Lord Of The Rings trilogy by J.R.R.Tolkien was voted the best novel of all time by the BBC’s Big Read survey. This astonishes me! I’ve read every single word of it, too, but not with much enjoyment.

A man I rather fancied absolutely adored it and pressed it upon me. He’d even learnt Elvish, totally immersing himself in Middle Earth. I’d read The Hobbit and enjoyed reading it aloud to my daughter, doing all the different voices, glorying in Gollum.

But the vast three-volume tome of The Lord Of The Rings was a different matter. It’s such a Boy’s Own book, all perilous journeys and battles, and very little humour. Tolkien is responsible for a lot of weirdly named men, too. I’ve met a Frodo and even a Gandalf, poor guys.

Jacqueline Wilson will be at the Bath children’s literature Festival on october 5. For tickets, visit bathfestivals.org.uk. Her latest novel, We are The Beaker Girls, is published next month.