Finding a friendly neanderthal in a local quarry – was it a quarry? – and caring for and befriending him.

Who wouldn’t want to discover that?

Looking back on it now, I cannot recall whether it was first or third person narration… and whether it was my first unreliable narrator. After all, no one else ever seemed to see Stig, did they?

I mean, it is iconic isn’t it.

I was reading this towards the end of Primary School and it was the first book to truly catapult me into a fantasy adventure.

Elves, dwarves, dragons. Treasure. Spiders. The highest of high fantasy.

From The Hobbit I drenched myself in Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings, the Silmarillion… and eventually, at University, found the gem that is Gawain and the Green Knight which Tolkien translated.

This was my first Gaiman novel and I adored it! The colour of the characters, both the sinister Messrs Croup and Vandemar and the wonderful Marquis de Carabas, as well as our everyman character Richard Mayhew.

Just wonderful!

And now Gaiman is a shared joy for me and my daughter. The Wolves in the Walls is fantastic, as is Fortunately the Milk!

Moving back to High Fantasy from Low, Perdido Street Station was a glorious and vivid read – populated by such a cast of exceptionally created species, a far cry from Tolkien’s.

The three novels of the New Crobuzon series play with urban, maritime and western genres as these familiar – and less familiar settings – are transformed in Miéville’s prose.

If you fancy some sentient cactacae, waterbound vodoyanoi, the bug-like khepri, winged garuda, slakemoths and avancs, the Remade and the fReemade, truly terrifying ganglords, pirates and mermaids and vampires, please try out these sprawling wonderful novels.

I recall a day when I was a child, I remember the cold of winter and the sense of it being the morning after the night before… perhaps a Boxing Day or New Year’s Day when my parents were still in bed and I curled up downstairs and came across the film of The Hound of the Baskervilles – the old Basil Rathbone one with the luminous dog… and I was enthralled.

Of course, the novel followed and a love affair with Holmes and Watson and the whole genre of crime and detective fiction began.

But for me, The Hound remains the pinnacle and the model of what detective fiction should be.

I am cheating a little here: this was not my first novel from Tana French – that was The Secret Place which pales beside this one.

This is the star of her Dublin Murder Squad series for me, and a great companion read to cite alongside the Holmes. Both draw on the gothic alongside the detective: they feature a mysterious creature (here, hiding in the walls of the house), empty and isolated settings (a desolate abandoned housing development, rather than the moors), and fantastic complex characters.

This is the Tana French novel I wish I had read first!

I adore this poem!

It is mad and literally off-your-head bonkers! Its pages are haunted by dead albatrosses, dead and reanimated sailors, Death and Life-in-Death.

And the mariner himself, the “grey-beard loon!” doomed to tell and re-tell his story, haunted by his own survival and guilt.

This poem – read at an impressionable age – inculcated in me a love of maritime narratives from Melville’s Moby-Dick, to Miéville’s The Scar and Patrick Ness’s And The Ocean Was Our Sky.

Patrick Ness was a reminder to me that YA fiction was more than Harry Potter!

His A Monster Calls is a sublime read and for anyone who wonders why a forty-something year-old man is reading Young Adult fiction, this novel is the answer – there is so much great fiction under that “YA” banner!

And the story of Conor O’Malley, struggling with an absentee father and a terminally ill mother and being bullied at school, finding solace and strength in the monster that comes walking for him is exquisite.

I was struggling with choosing the final books for this list….

But this novel, a relatively recent read compared to the rest, actually really fits the theme: on finishing this novel, I genuinely laid it down and thought “I want to read more like that”.

It was a challenging read in so many ways – the tale of a girl inhabited by Nigerian Igbo ọgbanje spirits, it is a remarkable tale of identity and strength and courage… But oh so rewarding! As is her Young Adult novel Pet.

Oh I adored this!

Mythic, personal, charming and written with a wonderful wit and style, with erudition and pathos and playfulness.

Reading this made Ali Smith a must-read author for me and I devoured her Seasonal Quartet over the last couple of years – and what a couple of years they have been from Brexit to Covid!