Sarah Moss: I never liked Wuthering Heights as much as Jane Eyre'

"I didn't learn to read in the first years of school and became entrenched in illiteracy until my grandmother, a retired primary school teacher, intervened. I loved the Swallows and Amazons series, and especially Swallowdale in which a shipwreck is redeemed and the adults provide exactly the right support when the children mess up. My favourite book growing up The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, whose politics I now find obviously objectionable."

"Teenagers are easily led. I saw myself in some of the plain, clever girls of Victorian fiction, reinforcing the 1990s message that cleverness was unattractive and attractiveness was stupid. Young women shouldn't be allowed to read the mid-century canon until they've learned critical thinking; the Beat poets, Updike, Amis et al taught me to see women and the world through the eyes of white men, and also to admire an excellent sentence."

"All books change my mind, that's what they are for. Recently Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes altered the way I understand much of the world around me. I don't think it was a book. Before I could write, my party trick was storytelling. Sometimes other parents would call the house late at night to have my parents bring me to the phone and admit to my sleepless little friends that the ghost stories I'd told earlier weren't true."

A delayed start to reading was overcome by a grandmother's intervention, leading to a love of adventure stories and landscape-rich domestic narratives. Childhood favorites combined rugged independence with comforting adult support, even as later reflection rejected some political aspects. Teenage reading of Victorian and mid-century writers shaped self-image and encouraged admiration for craft while also imposing limiting gendered perspectives. A contemporary work prompted a major shift in understanding of social reality. Early storytelling led naturally toward writing, and a return to a previously shelved novelist offered renewed companionship with a particular middle-aged perspective.

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