Where Shall We Run To?: A Memoir

This beautifully written memoir of childhood is an absolute joy. Alan Garner is one of Britain's greatest writers and with this book about growing up during the war years on Alderley Edge in Cheshire, we get to see where the inspirations for such classics as the Weirdstone of Brisingamen came from.

Garner has always used his environment and his family history as story seeds, especially in the Stone Book Quartet, and this memoir only adds to that. Through debilitating childhood illness where a prolonged stay in hospital forced him to teach himself to read, to being the brightest boy in school, Garner paints a picture of a bygone age. Roaming over Alderley Edge with his father, Garner steeps himself in knowledge, not just through reading, but through family and experience.

It's a short book, but immensely nostalgic, immensely readable. There's a touching coda at the end where he meets his childhood friend Harold on the Edge in 2001 and they compare how their lives diverged.

Funny, moving and quite brilliant.