This is the very first book I fell in love with. I just adored The Wind in the Willows. First it was read to me, and then I read it and took it into school to be read. I loved the cosy chapters in particular.

There are two sides to The Wind in the Willows. There are the Toad chapters, where he is out having adventures. But there is also a big theme in the book about home – for example the chapter “Dulce Domum”, where Mole finds his house again, and when the little Otter gets lost and the great god Pan comes along and helps him. I loved them so much, my parents actually had someone paint a picture of Pan for me on my wall. I was really taken with those romantic, nostalgic, homely types of things at that time. It wasn’t until much later that I started becoming interested in the relationship between fiction and real life.

Why were you so taken with those descriptions of home?

They were just so cosy and warm and snugly. The fiction that I liked when I was young was very much about adventures with animals and that sort of thing. I didn’t even really like The Famous Five by Enid Blyton, because it was a bit too realistic.

What characters did you like best in The Wind in the Willows? Lots of people go for Mr Toad, who is much more flamboyant – stealing cars, going to prison and escaping dressed as a washerwoman – than Ratty or Mole.

No, it was the Mole and Rat for me. There is a lot in the book that isn’t about Toad. There is one chapter when Rat is tempted to leave and go travelling, because the swallows are leaving, but in the end he decides home is more important. And, of course, all of Toad’s adventures end up with him trying to recapture his home, so that is a central theme to the book.

Do you think this book still works for today’s children?

I read it to my kids and they did enjoy it, although I am not sure they enjoyed it as much as I did!

So maybe it is more of a book for our generation, which brings back the nostalgia of childhood?

Maybe, but you can always try it on them. Read a short bit each night, and if they get bored they get bored. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

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Michael Morpurgo, writer and former Children's Laureate, recommends:

This was the first sad book I really loved. I’m sure most people know the story, but for those who don’t, it’s about the affection of a bird for a prince who is a statue. The swallow doesn’t want to leave the prince, stays too long and dies of cold. It’s really, really heartbreaking. But for some reason you want to read it again and again. It’s a sort of extraordinary love story, and really is exquisitely written.

What is it about sad books that makes us want to read them again and again?

I think the books that really make a difference are the ones that touch the deepest part of you. We like to laugh and we need to laugh. But we also know we can feel loss and we can feel pain. And we can empathise with other people’s loss and pain. Maybe this is the way we feel we are not alone. If you read about feelings of loss and pain in a book, you can relate to it.

My book War Horse is a case in point. It has been made into this extraordinary play with the horses played by giant puppets. If you go to the theatre you can see a thousand people coming out of the performance, and a large proportion of them will have been crying their eyes out for the last two hours. They identify with the great sadness of the First World War. It’s a release for them to cry, in the same way that it’s a release for us to read a book and feel both grief and joy.

Some would argue that children shouldn’t be reading books that make them cry and feel sad. What would you say?

I think it is deeply patronising to assume that children only like to laugh. It’s a complete misunderstanding of the human condition to think that understanding grief suddenly begins when you are an adult, and before that we must just be amused. The fact is that children have to face – and do face – both joy and loss, and that should be reflected in what they read. Otherwise what they read will simply be superficial. We need the superficial from time to time, but we also need what resonates deeply.

When some people talk to children it’s almost as if they are talking to kids in a pram. They put on a silly voice and want to make them gurgle and smile. We somehow don’t grow out of it. But there comes a point when children grow out of it for you, because they start looking at the world around them and know it’s a complicated place. Happy families are fine for when you are little, but they don’t always exist in real life.

Children look around them, and they can see growing difficulties in the world that they are going to have to come to terms with – whether it’s to do with war or the environment or whatever. All these things are on television. Whether we like it or not, children take it on board and a book has got to reflect that.

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Alice Bell, science writer, recommends:

This book has been in print for a long time, so there are a few generations of children that have read it. For me, it’s fascinating to talk to people who are now in their twenties and thirties about how they remember it. People often mention the illustrations. The book plays with metaphors to explain things but does so in a visual way. They had white knights as white blood cells, a scab which the knights are protecting, and the battlements of a castle. When I talk to adults about this today, they will say, “I remember that!” Another bit that people often remember are the robots that explained reproduction. The book clearly tried to make it not very obviously human – a way of distancing it from reality while also being able to explain it.