Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman

Dear Diary.

On Friday I had a job, a fiancee, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancee, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly.

After stopping to help a young girl in trouble, Richard Mayhew finds to his horror that he seems to have dropped out of the world. Not only do his friends and colleagues not recognise him, but no one else seems to even see him. Cashpoints don't recognise his bank card, automatic doors can't sense him and his flat has been let out to someone else! Desperate to get his life back, Richard finds himself in another London located beneath the streets of the city we know by that name, in the sewers and disused tube stations, where all those London landmarks with strange names have a literal counterpart. An Earl has his Court on an underground train, the Night's Bridge is a deadly place, the Black Friars guard a key to release an Angel - named Islington - from his prison. London Below is where the people go who "fall through the cracks" of society, a place where rats are venerated but a human life is fragile. Richard no longer exists in London Above, but can he hope to survive long in London Below?

In Gaiman's introduction to Neverwhere, he writes that his intention was, "to write a book that would do for adults what the books I had loved when younger, books like Alice in Wonderland, or the Narnia books, or the Wizard of Oz did for me as a kid." If that is so, he certainly succeeded. After just one reading, Neverwhere felt like a classic to me, like something I knew inside out because it wasn't just a book that had been written, but something organic, something that had grown naturally and that somehow, I had always known this story. It was more like a mythology than a novel. London is an old city, with so much forgotten history and so many romantic, imaginative landmarks and names that Gaiman's explanation makes sense of them all. Of course the Earl has a Court. Of course the Angel Islington is a real figure. Of course the Black Friars are a real order of monks with a mysterious purpose. In an unsettling way, Gaiman's Neverwhere comes to feel more real than the real city of London.

Neverwhere is a wonderful fantasy quest with a humour reminiscent of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, only it takes place beneath London rather than in space. Perhaps there is some inspiration from classic Doctor Who, but Neverwhere is what alerted me to the wonderful imagination of Neil Gaiman. True, sometimes I got so engrossed in the world of London Below that I would wonder, vaguely, what the actual plot was - what were the characters' goals. For the most part, though, I didn't wonder for long but just sat back and enjoyed the ride.

London Below has some wonderful characters: the Lady Door with a special talent for opening doors that no one else can - that no one else even knows are there. The Marquis de Carabas - named from a fairy tale - the arrogant, flamboyant rogue. And in Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar we have the creepiest villainous duo I have yet encountered, chillingly, inhumanly evil; "I suppose you could call them men, yes. Two legs, two arms, a head each." Yet alongside the shivers evoked by this terrifying duo is a lot of dark humour in their very matter-of-factness and the contrast between them. Mr Croup is smart-talking, sly and cruel. Vandemar is mentally slow and brutally honest. This combination of clever baddie and thuggish, stupid baddie is hardly an original one, but Croup and Vandemar stand out from the rest. But despite all the dangers encountered below the streets of London, the scariest moment was the "Ordeal" that Richard is tested with, a scene of psychological horror that leaves Richard - and maybe the reader too - questioning his own sanity. His hallucinations - if that's what he experiences - are terribly convincing.

I first had Neverwhere recommended to me in my first week at university, September 2004, but it took me until last spring to get around to reading it. When I did, I wondered how I could have waited so long, and why my friends had not insisted more strongly that I stop dawdling, put down everything else and read this book. Neverwhere is without doubt the best book I read in 2010, a must-read for Londoners and London-lovers with a love for a good imagination.

Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery

What better way to start a new year than to rediscover my favourite book of all time?

When old-fashioned, late-middle-aged brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert send for an orphan boy to help on their farm at Green Gables, the last person they expect to meet is the precocious, imaginative redhead Anne Shirley. At eleven Anne has never been loved or wanted, but makes up for lost time by winning the hearts of the rural community of Avonlea, winning friends - and a few enemies - with her impulsive ways.

I first read this book at the age of about seven, and immediately Anne was a true "kindred spirit." Like me, she lived more in a dream world than the real one, making up stories left, right and centre, and being remarkably scatterbrained when it came to real life. I spent hours reading and rereading about her exploits until, looking back, it feels difficult to separate the book from my own childhood. L. M. Montgomery brings Avonlea, Prince Edward Island to life by furnishing it with a cast of lovable and believable characters. As well as the irrepressible Anne, there is Mrs Rachel Lynde, who made it her business to know everyone else's, shy and softhearted Matthew who wraps his sister around his little finger without seeming to try, and Marilla who isn't half as stern as she'd have you believe. There are countless ladies who are known only as Mrs [Husband's-name Surname] - a thing that confused me no end when I was small. Then, among the younger generation who I know better than many of my own primary school classmates: pretty, jolly Diana Barry, spiteful Josie Pye and her sister Gertie, airhead Ruby Gillis, sensible Jane Andrews, pompous Charlie Sloan, the rather nerdy Moody Spurgeon McPherson and of course the rascally Gilbert Blythe, who makes his debut in the book's most infamous scene by having a slate cracked over his head after making fun of Anne's red hair.

Anne of Green Gables is a light, episodic novel, the majority of the book taking place during Anne's first couple of years at Green Gables, showing her falling from scrape to scrape, and also experiencing simple delights with such pleasure that you can't help but feel her wonder: eating ice cream for the first time at a Sunday School picnic, making friends, exploring the great outdoors and inventing histories for every place. Anne really is a story to make you appreciate the little things, and to a small girl such as Anne, everything is the most important thing in the world.

You don't really notice Anne changing much, but as the novel progresses, she grows up naturally, her excitable speeches don't sound quite so precocious and gradually she comes to keep her excitable ways under control. Almost before you know it, Anne is fifteen and heading off to Queen's Academy to work for her teacher's certificate. Although she is still very much Anne, I can't help agreeing with Marilla as she laments the loss of the funny, melodramatic little girl Anne was.

"I just couldn't help thinking of the little girl you used to be, Anne. And I was wishing you could have stayed a little girl, even with all your queer ways. You're grown up now, and you're going away; and you look so tall and stylish and so - so - different altogether in that dress..."

As if to reassure the reader as much as Marilla, Anne quickly lets us know that:

"I'm not a bit changed - not really. I'm only just pruned down and branched out."

Anne never gives up her vivid imagination, but channels it into her writing and English Literature studies, and she continues to fall in and out of trouble for several volumes to come.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis.

I can't remember a time when I didn't know the story of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Realistically, it probably wasn't the first book I ever read, but I have no memory of it being new to me, of not knowing this book, and then discovering it for the first time. Looking it up online, I discover that the BBC's Sunday night family drama adaptation of this book was aired in November 1988 - or just after my third birthday, and before any but my very earliest memories.

I do remember being told that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was a Christian allegory and that Aslan represented Jesus in a fairy-tale setting. Being a good little Sunday School girl I just nodded and thought, "but of course!" though I don't know if I'd worked it out myself before being told, or whether it just made sense. Quite probably, the word "allegory" was not one I would have used myself at such a young age, precocious child though I may have been.

There is no doubt that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe played a crucial part in forming my love of reading. It kick-started my realisation that stories could help me to understand the world and opened up to me the world of possibilities, to the magical nature of a really good book. Like War Drobe in Spare Oom, books could take me to far away lands. I wanted so much to discover Narnia for myself. For many years the back of my own wardrobe was decorated with a childishly-drawn map of Narnia, with movable figures: a Lucy, a faun and of course the lamp post, tiny figures to give the idea of perspective, that this was a "simply enormous wardrobe" containing a whole world. Even as an adult, if I stay in a new bedroom, I have to check the wardrobe. Just in case. Four or five years ago, I went on holiday with my family to Ireland. On the first night we stayed in a wonderful guesthouse that seemed to have come straight from a children's book, with delicious food, a kitchen that seemed to belong in a Famous Five adventure, and in one of the bedrooms a magnificent wardrobe, the sort of wardrobe where Things Happen. My sister and I (aged 18 and 20 at the time) took one look at each other - and raced each other to the wardrobe. Of course, there was nothing there - but there could have been.

I have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe probably more often than any other book in my life (except perhaps Anne of Green Gables) and still it doesn't lose its charm. The details are as fresh as ever - exactly what Lucy had for tea with Mr Tumnus, and all the different varieties of toast - a detail that was not lost on the makers of the latest film adaptation. Lewis's narrative voice is another important part of the book's magic - he writes as if he were a favourite uncle, which adds a cosiness as if being read to. Indeed, I feel that this is a book meant to be read aloud, and sometimes baffle my family when they hear my voice reading aloud and they are well aware there's no one else with me. I am adopted-aunt to my friend's twin daughters and I am looking forward to the day when they are old enough for me to read this book to them. When I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I feel that I am eight years old again, in an endless summer holiday, and that the door into Narnia is just a few metres away, through my very own wardrobe. This is not just a story for me, but an intrinsic part of my childhood. I am quite sure it is part of what made me who I am today.

I haven't yet found my way into Narnia through my own wardrobe, but nevertheless, the books crammed onto its top shelf open the doors into many other worlds.