I Wish I’d Written: Kate Saunders

Kate Saunders chooses a deliciously creepy book, The Ghosts by Antonia Barber.

It was the endless summer holiday of 1970; I was ten years old, and finally allowed to walk the short distance to the Highgate Library (thrillingly opposite the famous cemetery) by myself. There was then a separate children’s library, and I spent many blissful hours in that hushed room, with its squeaky parquet floor, and deep shafts of sunlight filled with endlessly swirling dust.

It was here that I came across one book that became a template for my perfect story – The Ghosts by Antonia Barber. I was hooked from the opening chapter, set in a depressing basement flat in Camden Town. Two modern children, Jamie and Lucy, move to an old house in the country, where they meet two Victorian children, Sara and Georgie. The Victorian children have made the painful journey through time to ask Lucy and Jamie for help. I was fascinated by Barber’s idea that time is a great wheel, and that you travel to a different time by passing through the wheel’s still centre (this makes perfect sense to me). I’m still trying to write a novel as brilliant as this one – and as deliciously creepy.

The Ghosts by Antonia Barber is O/P

Kate Saunders’s latest book Five Children on the Western Front is published by Faber and Faber 978-0571310951, £10.99 hbk.