Hello Annie. Welcome to my blog. Tell me a bit about yourself.

 Thanks for the opportunity to talk about my favourite books, Rhoda.  I’m Annie Burrows, by the way, and nowadays I write light hearted Regency romances for Harlequin Mills & Boon.

I come from a family of bookworms.  Every Saturday, my parents would take me to the local library to select as many books as we were allowed to take home.  At Christmas, I always got an annual of some sort, and, more than even the stories and brightly coloured pictures, I remember the smell of them when first opened.  I suppose it was only printers ink and glossy paper, but to me it represented a whole new world of the imagination to explore.

I read a lot.   I mean A LOT.  I was quite a sickly child, but being stuck in bed was never much of a hardship because it was a brilliant excuse to read yet another fabulous story!

 Which book have you inherited from the generation above you?

 By the time I was about ten, I felt as though I’d read all the books in the children’s section of our rather small local library and began to plunder my parents’ bookshelves.  However, I can’t talk about one of those, because there is no way I would ever be able to prize one of their own precious books away from them.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about one of those that came in my bundle of Christmas presents.  “The Children of Green Knowe”, by L. M. Boston.  I’ve still got the battered copy on my bookshelf, and I will never part from it.  It would be like trying to say goodbye to some of my dearest friends.  It is one of those books that has everything: some adventure, some time travel, a bit of a mystery, and a creepy, overgrown tree that might come alive during the night and wander about the grounds of the massive old house where the main character has to stay without his parents.  I went on to read others in the Green Knowe series, but none of them set my imagination on fire quite like the first time Tolly meets his great – grandmother, and the mysterious, possibly haunted, house at Green Knowe.

 Which book will you leave to the generations below you and why?

 As for the book I would hand on to my own children – it is “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” by Mark Haddon.

Neither of my children have inherited my addiction to reading, but this one – oh, this one I managed to get them all to read right to the very end.  It is a remarkable book.  It is told through the eyes of a boy who has Asperger’s Syndrome.  And the writer has done a brilliant job of making the reader understand the frustrations of his family and carers, though the boy himself is puzzled by it all.  It manages to be both funny and extremely moving.

And boy, do I wish I could write like that!

I loved the Children of Green Knowe too  (although the children in the mirror freaked me out a little bit). They had copies in my school library and I raced through them.

Thank you so much for sharing your Inherited Books with me. Do come visit again soon!

Annie’s book His Wicked Christmas Wager is published by Mills and Boon.

You can find out more about Annie’s writing at her website: www.annie-burrows.co.uk or “like” her at: www.facebook.com/AnnieBurrowsUK