Top 5: War Books

Although I've written a children's book about war myself I found it tricky to identify five others that I like. I read all the time when I was little (I must've been the only child around who was told off for reading too much) but I liked fairy tales and fantasies, stories about ghosts and dreams, time travel and parallel worlds. As a child born at the end of the 1950s, real wars seemed too close and too frightening. My grandfather had been a pilot in the First World War, my dad a pilot and then a POW in the Second. My Aunty Shosh was a Holocaust survivor. And although nobody discussed their experiences over the dinner table, I sensed the horror of the times and didn't want to read about it.  

So it was ages before I got around to reading The Diary of Anne Frank. I was scared I'd find it unbearably upsetting. It's not, of course. Anne's personality comes through so strongly and her voice is so real that you feel she's whispering in your ear. And there's something about the ordinariness of her concerns that's strangely reassuring. You might be hiding in an attic from people who want you dead, but you're still irritated by the boy in the next room and embarrassed because your bra's too tight. Anne made me understand how people survive in unimaginably awful situations. I wanted her to be my friend. Still do, actually. 

I feel the same about Anna, Judith Kerr's protagonist in her autobiographical When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Maybe it's because both writers are describing their own experiences that their writing makes the unbearable seem bearable. The wealth of detail doesn't just bring their experience alive; it makes us feel that we could cope with it - just like Anna and Anne do.

I enjoyed Zlata's Diary for the same reason. Zlata Filipovic lived through the Seige of Sarajevo and her ordinary 11-year-old-girl concerns about music, friends, and TV programmes in the context of the Bosnian War are always moving, often funny and, like Anne Frank's or Judith Kerr's, oddly comforting. Maybe it's because these books are all based on the author's first-hand experience of conflict that I find them more authentic and less disturbing than novels where the writer has imagined themselves in a real-life war situation. So my final two books are about imagined wars.

Although it's not a children's book, I loved HG Wells's War of the Worlds as a child. It was frightening in a good way because it's not real. I loved all the very English detail (aliens invading Surrey!) and the fact that the war-like aliens are eventually defeated by something so small, so human and so ordinary.

Finally, When the Wind Blows, Raymond Briggs's bleak but lovely graphic novel. I haven't read it for a long time, but the sweetness of his naive central characters, their love for each other and their misplaced trust in the authorities against the background of an imagined nuclear Armageddon, has stayed with me for longer than their eventual fate. Lovely.

Valentine Joe by Rebecca Stevens is out from from Chicken House for £6.99.