Catherine Johnson's Reading List

"I love this book. I also love Smith by Leon Garfield. I can remember, when I was in primary school, a teacher saying, ‘You’d like these.’ I didn’t read them because I didn’t like the covers of those editions, but I read them later. The Apprentices is all linked short stories. There’s a story in it called “The Lamplighter’s Funeral,” which is so evocative. But the one that really I love is called “The Valentine.” It’s the equivalent of a girl being in love with a boy band: the unattainable romance. She’s in love with a corpse. He’s a very good-looking corpse, and her father is the undertaker. Garfield does 18th century. Not many writers do this period. I read a lot of nonfiction but I think fiction is a really good way of seeing the time, so I found his stories really useful. His language is so good. His storytelling is so good. When I was a child it was definitely being read in primary schools, but it was written in the 1960s so whether it would be for the same age of readership now I do not know. When I first came across it, I was reading The Moomins , and Gemma by Noel Streatfeild. I remember buying Gemma because the 1972 edition had a cover with a girl who had a miniskirt and white boots and the lettering was 1970s curly. For a similar age of readers, there were also Rosemary Sutcliff with more scholarly books, Penelope Lively , and Nina Bawden, who we will get to in a minute. If you’re used to modern storytelling, Leon Garfield is old-fashioned but I think his books are fantastic. I love it. I love the language, I love the clothes. It’s a very fertile space for me. Also, London has always been a world city. There have been German parts, there have been Italian parts, French parts… In the 18th century, there was a massive Black population, because of how the Empire worked and because of how industrial slavery worked. There was a Black population all over the country, if you look at paintings in the big houses. That slowed down at the beginning of the 19th century, when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was abolished. I grew up in London, and London of 60 years ago was very different. You didn’t expect to see people like me in historical dramas. When I read nonfiction books and found that, actually, there have been non-white people in the UK for 2,000 if not more years, I thought, ‘This is exciting, I can go and write the fiction that I would have liked to read’—books that have people like me in."

"I picked this book because it’s so influential in historical children’s literature. It’s very good. It’s such a big book, and there are lots of kids who love a meaty book like that. Different books for different kids; some will like a little book of short stories like The Apprentices , whereas Coram Boy is an epic. It’s also set in the 18th century, and it’s important British history. There’s information about Thomas Coram and baby farming. What children love, I think, is that righteous indignation. A lot of the best children’s books are powered by that, by the feeling that it’s not fair , because children are never in positions of power. They can feel like the world is against them because they are children. The thought that babies would be killed willy-nilly! Coram Boy does so many things really, really well. It’s a classic already. “The thing about British history, especially in the 19th century, is that it was such a lot of the globe” It was the first children’s book that I can think of for this age group with a protagonist of colour. For years, we hadn’t featured in children’s books, even when it was a subject that might have logically included different sorts of people. All writers have a responsibility to tell a really involving, engaging story above all. Even if you’ve got an agenda, that’s not how you set out to write the book, you set out to write the book because you want people to think that this story is amazing. A lot of those books don’t get out there, whereas Coram Boy did. We tend to bowdlerise children’s fiction a lot. I wrote a book called Race to the Frozen North partly because I got into reading about Arctic exploration when I was a kid. And that was because my brother had a book with a picture of frostbite, which got me reading about Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic, where they all died and were frozen. Yes, children must be protected, but they do like a bit of ick. You’re not going to pick up that book unless you’re ready for it. It’s a big book. It’s probably for readers age 10 or 11 and up. Some kids will read anything. My youngest was reading Watership Down when she was five or six. I’d forgotten what was in it, and thought it was like The Animals of Farthing Wood . She liked it. What is for you will not pass you by."

"City of Stolen Magic is set in the middle of the 19th century. Magic exists but it’s not as whizz-bang as in The Elemental Detectives . The baddies are the East India Company . It’s anti- colonialism . The story starts off in India and comes to London. It’s a debut, she’s a new writer. One of the lovely things when you read a book is when you’re there with a character from another background, who knows things that you don’t know but you can relate to. There’s a lot readers will get out of this. It’s another facet to British history. The thing about British history, especially in the 19th century, is that it was such a lot of the globe. A quarter? A third? To see it from different perspectives is very important for young people. Apart from being a good story, you’re getting a different view of something. It’s important that we’re aware how things got to be as they are today. It’s about the East India Company which is suppressing magic, and there’s the righteous indignation that magic has been stifled. We’ve got a young protagonist, Chompa, who is taken to London to be used by the Company. But she is going to fight back. With her character Chompa, Nazneen shows that magic is for everybody, in a historical context. People read for so many reasons. What would it be like if…? How would I cope with great danger and risk? Would I be able to say loudly, ‘It’s not fair!’ and do something about it? That’s what a lot of the characters in all these books are doing, they are being indignant and finding things out and taking action, having agency. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I think the best stories are really just about love. I don’t mean romantic love, I mean familial love, I mean interpersonal love about finding one’s place and belonging in the world, how we make friends. I think good fiction, whether it’s historical or not, shows us that and that’s what people want to know about. There are other historical novels for this age group I would like to have chosen as well. The Red Necklace by Sally Gardner is set in the French Revolution. She writes phenomenal children’s books, phenomenal history. She is one of my all-time favourites. Elizabeth Laird is brilliant. She’s a beautiful writer and deserves to be read. And Candy Gourlay’s Bone Talk is a brilliant historical novel. She has written a sequel for older readers, Wild Song , published this year."