People often ask writers what they read. I change all the time, depending on the enthusiasm of the moment. What I shall try to do here is, from time to time, pull books off the shelf that you might share my enthusiasm for. You may already have come across them, of course.

Click on the links for past choices: Autumn 2001, Summer 2001, Spring 2001.

Winter/Spring Choice - books that take me into a different world. A lot of children's books do exactly that, which may be why I like them. But so do the best biographies.

I love books that take me into a different world. A lot of children's books do exactly that, which may be why I like them. But so do the best biographies.

One that has haunted me ever since I first read it is Dr Johnson and Mr Savage by Richard Holmes. The Johnson is the blessed Sam, he of the great dictionary. We are used to seeing him as a mature - even elderly - eccentric, with his moral pronouncements and his great learning. But this is the young Sam, just arrived in London with an impecunious pupil, half a tragedy in manuscript and tuppence ha'penny in his pocket. When Garrick, the pupil in question, challenged that story later in Boswell's hearing, Johnson said, 'Why yes. With tuppence ha'penny in my pocket and thou, Davy, with three ha'pence in thine'.

He was 27 and not far from starving. He had not completed his degree at Oxford. He had been turned down for several jobs as a schoolmaster because of his arrogance and his unfortunate physical tics. He was a provincial in a cruelly sophisticated town.

And then he met Richard Savage, the arch sophisticate. Savage was forty and 'a frequenter of the Coffee House, the Salon and the Green Room'. He was a poet. He knew Alexander Pope and others of the intelligentsia. His birth was shrouded in glamorous mystery - which he exploited to the full. He lived by his wits. He was a convicted murderer. He was clearly powerfully attractive.

This is a wonderful book. Johnson himself, according to Boswell, said, 'he could write the Life of a Broomstick'. But his Life of Savage is perhaps the first modern biography, full of feeling and a deep, romantic sympathy which did not pass judgement. (Johnson, that arch critic of manners and morals!) And this book describes not just the tragic events of Savage's life as he quarrelled with everyone who wanted to help him and spiralled faster and faster out of control, but also the life of the young man he dazzled. Real people are a lot stranger than fiction!

I've also been reading two historical delights - and old friend Sweet Witch by Richard Llewellyn and a new one A Penniless Prospect by Joanna Maitland.

Sweet Witch is the story of a young heiress who comes home to Wales in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. She has been away too long and the locals are hostile - but there is a young man who may, or may not, be on her side. He says he loves her - but he may be a smuggler with other motives. Can she trust him? Lovely stuff!

A Penniless Prospect is a real find: Jamie is a plain girl, with no dowry, and a callous stepmother who doesn't believe in Cinderella. The Regency world could look beautiful but if you were a woman you had no legal standing. And if you had no money, no one would rescue you from starving. Jamie turns herself into a gardener's boy and rescues herself. Luckily for Richard, Earl Hardinge, one of the nicest heroes I've read for a long time.

As I'm writing about a larger heroine at the moment, I am feeling particularly warn to others in the same situation. I love Paula Gosling's psychologically truthful whodunits anyway - but I come back again and again to Loser's Blues. Not only is the heroine a delight, but I really feel for the jazz musician hero. Quite apart from the suspense of the murder mystery, the scene in which Johnny takes on a fiendishly difficult piano piece and plays it in front of a hyper critical audience always has me on the edge of my seat. Total satisfaction.