And my father always took me to the library. We were both book addicts.

Perhaps the story in the book is just the lid on a pan: It always stays the same, but underneath there's a whole world that goes on - developing and changing like our own world.

Why could she remember nothing but stories of frightened people when Capricorn looked at her? She usually found it so easy to escape somewhere else, to get right inside the minds of people and animals who existed only on paper, so why not now? Because she was afraid. "Because fear kills everything," Mo had once told her. "Your mind, your heart, your imagination.

Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.

My daughter, Anna, is almost 15, and my son, Ben, is almost 10.

She is a real bookworm. I think she lives on print. Her whole house is full of books - looks as if she likes them better than human company.

Sometimes Dustfinger thought Basta's constant fear of curses and sudden disaster probably arose from his terror of the darkness within himself, which made him assume that the rest of the world must be exactly the same.