Sarah Driver recommends Five Brilliant Books

‘Absolute truancy…I felt its urgent demand in the blood.’

Defying the usual category of nature or travel writing, this ‘elemental journey’ is a raucous love song for the deep exploration of wildness. It took the author seven years and every last scrap of energy to write. She visited Amazon shamans, anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept and hung out with sea gypsies. This book is my favourite travel companion on long journeys. I recommend it to anyone who has ever felt the call of the wild singing in their veins. Be warned: it’ll make you want to bunk off.

   
4. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis 

‘This wood was very much alive…it was a rich place: as rich as plumcake.’

I first read this curled up on the sofa with my mum, both of us hopelessly lost in the book’s magical world. I loved the descriptions of hidden places where children could have secret adventures, the enticing yellow and green rings, and the eerie ‘wood between the worlds’, with its pools of water serving as portals to other realms.

  
5. Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan

‘But in from that night kept sidling the thin black witch who was the pain.’

A startling, masterly re-working of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red. If any book has ever staggered me breathless with its rawness, immediacy and originality, it’s this one. Once I’d put the book down, it pretended innocence, but I knew better—I could still feel the magic seeping between its closed pages.