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'A book ought to be an ice pick, to break up the frozen sea within us.' (Franz Kafka)

I first came across this quote from Kafka some years ago, when I was putting together a collection of books which I hoped would appeal to some of the young offenders I was working with, and it's always resonated: a book - the right book - can have tremendous power, can't it?

For some reason I thought of it today - perhaps it was because I just heard Ruby Wax on the radio, talking about depression, and a series of mental cogs creaked rustily into motion and came up with Kafka. (I remember doing German at A-Level. We really weren't very good, and when we were presented with Kafka's short stories, with ants crawling out of a hole in the palm of someone's hand, men turning into beetles etc, there was a great deal of head-scratching - was it us, or was it him?)

And then I got to thinking, what would be my 'ice pick' book? A book that changed the way I felt, or perhaps was just a comfort at a difficult time? I always find it difficult to choose, but rather oddly, this is the one that keeps popping up in my mind's eye.

Reading Tanya Landman's post yesterday about the shortcomings and strong points of heroines on the silver screen got me thinking about the films I saw as a child.

I've always found that there are certain characters in books of whom I get so fond that I don't want to say goodbye to them when the book ends. The hobbits were like that; when I finished The Lord of the Rings, I walked around in mourning for some days because I was no longer in a world where they were. Perhaps oddly, Horatio, in Hamlet, is another. There's something I really like about Horatio. He's on the edge of things, watching, but loyal and caring and clever. I picture him with a long scarf wound round his neck, glasses, a shock of dark hair, a wry smile. A bit like a French assistant we had when I was in the sixth form, as it happens!

And it's the same with the books I write. A few years ago, I wrote a book about Alfred the Great. It was called Warrior King. It's out of print now, but like Arnie, it'll be back. Soonish, I hope! There was a character in there called Cerys, a magic lady, a wise woman, with silver eyes. I really liked her.

She emerged from my imagination, but the other character from that book who stayed in my mind was real. She was Alfred's daughter, Aethelflaed (though in the book I called her Fleda - it made it less confusing, because there were so many other Aethel-whatnots hanging around). I discovered her when I was looking for a child who could be my point-of-view character when telling the story of Alfred - it was such a gift when I discovered that his oldest child was a daughter who would be just the right age at the time of the events in my story.

But Fleda became much more than that. I grew very fond of her. She was warm, impulsive, brave, and she could be defiant when she was defending something she believed in. I knew she must have been like that, because I knew that later, after the scope of my book, she married the Lord of the Mercians - and after his death, she became the Lady of the Mercians, Myrcna Hlaefdige, their de facto queen. She led them into battle and rebuilt their towns, and after her death, she was named in the Annals of Ulster as 'famosissima regina Saxonum', that most famous queen of the Saxons.

So when I got the chance to write a story for an anthology called Daughters of Time, a collection of stories about remarkable women from British history, written by contributors to the History Girls blog, it took no thinking at all to decide whom I would choose. I wrote about Aethelflaed at a time of transition for her, when she went from being princess of Wessex to wife of the Lord of the Mercians. It was an absolute joy to spend more time with her.

The only trouble is that the more I read about her, the more interesting she became. She had one daughter, Aelfwyn. She fostered her brother's oldest (but not quite legitimate) son, Aethelstan (who later became a great king of England): her brother was Edward, who succeeded Alfred. She fought alongside her brother; they must surely have been close. Yet after Aethelflaed's death, when Aelfwyn should have succeeded her, Edward rode in and carried Aelfwyn away into Wessex... and nothing more was heard of her. Edward became King then of Mercia as well as Wessex. Maybe she was put into a nunnery - or maybe not.

How much conflict and conniving, triumph and sadness, lie behind those few bare facts! I'd love to spend more time with Aethelflaed - and with Aethelstan and Aelfwyn. I'd love to explore their stories and try to understand their lives. One day, perhaps!

Daughters of Time is published this weekend. My story of the Lady of the Mercians is in there, but so are twelve other fascinating stories, many by writers who have blogged on An Awfully Big blog Adventure: Penny Dolan, for example, has written about Mary Wollstonecraft, Joan Lennon about Mary Anning, Catherine Johnson about Mary Seacole, Dianne Hofmeyr about Elizabeth Stuart. If you don't know much about any of these - as I didn't - you know what you need to do!

This week I've been staying with my son and his family in Brussels, One of the very many nice things about doing this is that I get the opportunity to read lots of new books. It starts on the journey over there. I travel from Bristol to London by train or bus, and then usually on the Eurostar, so there's plenty of time to read, and my Kindle allows me to take a good supply of books along with me. This time I finished the second book of The Flaxfield Quartet by Toby Forward, which is a fantasy about wizards (but not at all like Harry Potter). It's very good, and I'll be reviewing it soon over on Abba Reviews. Then I began The Storm Bottle, an unusual adventure story set in Bermuda, by fellow SAS author Nick Green, who knows so much about dolphins that I suspect he may have been one in another life. I'll finish that later today on the journey back.

Then I have a treat in store - Mary Hoffman's David, which is about the model for Michelangelo's famous statue. Mary Hoffman is another SAS person, and I first heard about this book when she talked about it at an SAS conference, just before it was published a few years ago. I've been meaning to read it ever since, and now the right moment has arrived: yesterday, I went to an exhibition in Brussels about Leonardo da Vinci, with my son and eldest grandson, Oskar. There were models of many of Leonardo's inventions - here's Oskar trying one out - and a film about his life and about the re-creation of some of his designs: notably an early parachute which an English adventurer with a gleam in his eye decided to try out - and survived to tell the tale! Anyway, there were hints of a not-very-friendly rivalry between Leonardo and the much younger Michelangelo, so I'm hoping Mary might have something to say about that. Even if she doesn't, I just want a pass into the world of fifteenth century Italy, and I know her book will give me that. 

Richard and Joanna are great readers, so there are usually lots unfamiliar books for me to read here - though nowadays Richard mostly uses his Kindle: apart from the convenience, it's much cheaper to buy English books in Belgium that way. Still, I was able to read Ian Rankin's latest, Standing In Another Man's Grave, in which crotchety detective Rebus makes a welcome return from retirement, and also a book called Train Dreams, by an American writer called Denis Johnson. I'd never come across this author before. The book, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, is very short (only 116 small pages), but it packs quite a punch without wasting a word. It's about an ordinary man, Robert Grainier, living in rural America in the first half of the 20th century, and it reveals how the extraordinary can be found inside the apparently ordinary: Robert is an unassuming, kindly man who endures some terrible things, and just keeps on. Despite being so short, it somehow manages to have an epic sweep.

Joanna is Polish, and she lent me a book of poetry by a poet called Wislawa Szymborska, called Tutaj/Here. The poet was 85 when this book was published, but her quiet, ironic, amused voice is ageless. I particularly liked a poem called Thoughts That Visit Me on a Busy Street, which ponders the possibility that Nature recycles faces: 

These passersby might be Archimedes in jeans
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharoah with briefcase and glasses.

Then there are the books I read with my grandchildren. Oskar has been 'doing' Julia Donaldson at school, so we read several of hers, and also a book I'd taken over for him - Vivian French's Hedgehogs Don't Eat Hamburgers, which is a rhythmic, funny delight. Casper is only sixteen months old, but he already has his favourites: Rod Campbell's flap book, Dear Zoo, an Usborne nursery rhyme book which plays the tunes, and two French board books which he knows will play sounds if he presses a finger in the right spot. I took him a book by Jack Tickle called The Very Silly Sheep, which has brilliantly engineered pop-up animals. Casper loves it, as you can see, but I'm not sure how long it will survive intact!

This is my last post for the time being; I decided it was time to stand aside for a while. You'll see some exciting new blogsters joining us over the next month, namely Damian Harvey, Lari Don, Saviour Pirotta and Anna Wilson. I'll continue to review over on ABBA Reviews, and to post on The History Girls. Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you over there!

www.suepurkiss.com

Landscape is very important to me, both generally, and in my writing. Different landscapes reflect and inspire different moods, different thoughts - in fact, the same landscape can occasion different moods. I was in France recently, in La Rochelle, a seaport on the Atlantic coast. It has a small artificial beach. One day, the sea was a dull greenish grey, the sky a mass of bright blue-grey cloud. The sand was pale, almost white, and there were were one or two white sails out on the water. There were two vivid spots of colour: a coat, and a buoy, both bright scarlet. There was something striking about the limited range of colours: something ominous and strange.

The next day, I saw the same spot in sunshine. The sky was mostly blue, with innocent puffball clouds. The sea was a much darker blue, and it looked calm and inviting; there was no hint of threat. You can imagine the different types of story - or different points in the same story - in which those two variations of the same scene could feature - could, in fact, become central to the narrative. I don't have a picture of the beach, but here's one of the towers of La Rochelle in that very special evening light you sometimes get. (They are beautiful, the towers of La Rochelle beautiful, but one of them was a prison in Napoleonic times and earlier - the walls are scratched with graffiti, carved painstakingly with images of the ships from which the prisoners had been captured.)

An exhibition at the British Library explores the way in which the British landscape has inspired writers for the last thousand years. It shows how authors not only record what they see, but their ' novels, poetry and plays can shape our perceptions and transform our places through imagination.'

Of course, if there's one thing the British Library has plenty of, it's books. But how do you go about creating an exhibition out of them? Well, first you decide on different types of landscape: Rural Dreams, Dark Satanic Mills, Wild Places, Beyond the City, Cockney Visions, and Waterlands. Then, you sift through the extraordinary range of manuscripts and printed books you have at your disposal - and you realise that for each category, you can display a fantastically eclectic mix of writers. So, for instance, with Beyond the City, which explores the suburbs (are they an idyll? A threat? A refuge?), next to a gorgeously illuminated centuries-old volume of the Canterbury Tales (click here to see this), you may find an excerpt from one of J G Ballard's books about the 'edge-lands', or something from Betjeman. Rural Dreams has examples from Hardy, a manuscript of Edward Thomas's poem Adlestrop, and the manuscript of Alan Garner's The Owl Service, along with a recording of Stella Gibbons talking about how she came to write one of the funniest books I've ever read, Cold Comfort Farm. Dark Satanic Mills includes a fascinating display about Ted Hughes' book, Remains of Elmet, which was inspired not only by the industrial remains in the Calder Valley, but also by Fay Godwin's wonderful, atmospheric photos of this landscape: recordings and letters offer a fascinating insight into how each of them fed off the other's vision.

There are videos, too, with writers such as Simon Armitage and Robert MacFarlane discussing the part landscape plays in inspiring their writing, and images and soundscapes - the ones which illustrate Waterworld are particularly atmospheric and imaginative.

The exhibition is called Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands. If you can make it to the exhibition, be sure to go to the cafe to restore yourself afterwards - it has its very own collection of treasures, including a pear and chocolate tart which I recall with deep affection and not a little longing!

So what have I been up to on the last few Thursday mornings?

Well, let's see.

I've been a little girl with a crush on a handsome German prisoner of war, who made her a tiny bracelet woven from strands of coloured wire - which she was still to treasure nearly seventy years later, even though her father told her she must have nothing to do with the enemy.

I've flown over the ocean on a giant seagull, and come home safely.

Once a week, I teach a writing class in the village where I live. At the moment I have 11 students; the youngest is 20+, and the oldest is 90-. (The oldest, Phyllis, had a new laptop for Christmas, and she's very excited about the word count tool.) As far as I know, there is only one who wants to actually write a novel, the rest are just delighting in the opportunity to do something they've always enjoyed but have never quite got round to before. For the first few weeks this term, I decided to do some poetry. It's not what any of us likes best, but I felt it would be good to go macro - to focus on something concentrated - rather than going large, which was what we did last term with fiction and a little biographical writing.

As always, the students surprised me. Their natural tendency is to use rhyme, so I asked them to write shape poems. It was just playing, freeing them up: I didn't expect them to come up with anything much. But they did: there were several that, after they'd been read out, provoked that moment of stillness, that sort of 'Oh!' of surprise at a freshly minted thought or image. (I'm sorry I don't have any of them to hand to demonstrate - you'll have to take my word for it.) The following week, we did haikus, and the same thing happened. There was a lovely one by a farmer, where she talked about her favourite time of day on the land, 'in the amber light of evening' if memory serves me well.

I've just re-read Terry Pratchett's book, Lords and Ladies - such fun! Part of the renowned  Discworld series, it stars the three witches, Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg and Magrat Garlick. It also features the wizards - in particular, Archchancellor Ridcully. At one point, a bandit chieftain foolishly holds up the coach which is carrying Ridcully, the Bursar, the Librarian and Ponder Stibbins. The chieftain sees the wizard's staff poking out of the window.