Which childhood book sparked your love of reading? The Shoe Shop Bears by Margaret J Baker, now sadly out of print. It was the first book I bought with my own money. I was bored by picture books and w

As a child, Camilla was captivated by Anna Sewell's Black Beauty. She says, "I have to admit, I ended up probably being a pony-mad child with Black Beauty. which I howled over, night after night after

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

Kerry Fowler suggests the best books to curl up with this month

Our books editor Zoe West’s favourite picks for the month