My #readingjourney continues in the countdown to World Book Night. Today I'm thinking about some of my favourite historical fictions. 

Set in Victorian England Fingersmith is that rare thing, a novel that is both literary and a page-turner with an astonishing twist. 

Music and Silence is a formally complex novel with music as its thread, and is beautifully rendered. 

More a mix of fiction and memoir than a true historical novel, Austerlitz meditates on time and loss in exploring a past in which a five-year-old is sent to England on a Kindertransport. 


Pure, set in Paris in 1785, tells of the demolition of a vast and ancient graveyard and is so vividly evocative of its period it leaps from the page.  

Continuing my @WorldBookNight #readingjourney :

At about twelve-years-old my appetite was whet for historical fiction when I discovered Jean Plaidy. I devoured them and they were never ending. Plaidy was really called Eleanor Hibbert and wrote under three pseudonyms  – Philippa Carr and Victoria Holt were the others – so I never ran out of new ones to read. Plaidy was my favourite and I still have some of my old dog-eared copies. Historical fiction has moved on since then (not least for their covers and some of the titles) but they still have a certain nostalgic 70s charm.

My first novel QUEEN'S GAMBIT has been selected for WORLD BOOK NIGHT and so on 23rd April people all over the country will be giving away copies in a bid to spread the word about the joys of reading. 

As part of the initiative people are joining the online conversation about the books that they love and have inspired them.

Here are come of my own childhood favourites read avidly over and over again under the covers with a torch. Frances Hodgson-Burnett captivated me when I was very young with her tales of isolated girls and my discovery of Laura Ingalls-Wilder (all nine in the series) gave me hours of wonderful escapism into the world of a pioneer family. 

What were your childhood favourites?