Magic, Murder and Mystery: The Ambassadors for the National Year of Reading 2026,

Adele Parks

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

I read To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee when I was 13. It’s written from a child’s point of view, but I understood the reader is supposed to appreciate the humour and irony of Scout’s unselfconscious observations focused on adult hypocrisy.

Set in a sleepy town in South Alabama during the Great Depression, the multi-layered story tackles some of the biggest issues going: racism and religious sanctimony. I remember this not just as a rite-of-passage book, with low-key sex and violence, but one of the first books that I read which had a nonliteral title. But if by ‘grown-up’ book you mean completely inappropriate, then I think Flowers In The Attic by V. C. Andrews, which I read when I was 12, qualifies.

My older sister’s friend read it first and loaned my sister the book, and she passed it on to me. Word of mouth is always so enticing! We were all caught up in the tragic, haunting gothic story. Four siblings endure unspeakable horrors at the hands of those they should trust the most. With themes such as murder and incest, it’s far from an easy read. It’s so emotional, though, I loved it.

Dan Jones

What’s the best thing you’ve learnt from a biography?

Sir George Everest, the somewhat pompous geographer who gave his name to the world’s tallest mountain, insisted that his surname was correctly pronounced ‘Eave-rest’. He was a complete pain on this topic. So there is some irony in what followed. I learned that fact from Into The Silence by Wade Davis, a wonderful group biography of the men who tried to climb Mount Eave-rest in the 1920s.

David Baldacci

Is there a book you preferred as an audiobook?

As a family we listened to all the Harry Potter books when our kids were young. Carry On star Jim Dale is, in my opinion, one of the best audiobook readers of all time. If there’s a hall of fame, he deserves to be in it.

And to say that he ‘read the books’ doesn’t do him justice. He lived the books, bringing a performance of a lifetime and holding my entire family spellbound. Hats off to him. I tell everyone to listen to the books. It’s a whole other experience. For me, Dale has no peer.

Nash Falls by David Baldacci (Pan, £9.99) is out now.

Fern Britton

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

The House On The Strand by Daphne du Maurier. I was about 14 and very interested in spooky mansions and mad scientists. This absolutely fitted the bill.

Dick’s old friend/lover from Cambridge, Magnus, invites Dick to stay in his ancient home Kilmarth in Cornwall (incidentally, the house where Du Maurier lived until her death). Magnus is a brilliant scientist and entices Dick into drinking a new potion as an experiment.

As it takes effect, his 20th-century surroundings dissolve and he finds himself in 14th-century Cornwall. His first trip is not to be his last . ..

A Cornish Legacy by Fern Britton (HarperCollins, £9.99) is out now.

Sir Ian Rankin

What’s the best thing you’ve learnt from a biography?

I enjoy reading about artists and last year I was gripped by Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing: A Life Of Paul Gauguin. I had always loved his art but I knew, too, that his personal life was problematic – to say the least!

Prideaux restores his reputation and also shows us how he championed the culture and people of French Polynesia. On top of which, I learnt that a fight with a mob of French youths left him in pain for decades, chiefly because his attackers wore clogs when they kicked him.

He was also one of the construction workers on the Panama Canal, and as a seaman he once stopped off at Aberdeen – you can’t say that of too many French Post-Impressionists!

The Heights by Ian Rankin (Orion, £25) is out on October 8.

Katherine Rundell

Is there a book you preferred as an audiobook?

Timothy West’s reading of Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers novels are as close to perfection as humanity can reach, I think.

My favourite of the series is Doctor Thorne, a story about love, class, power, money and delight: 20 hours and 50 minutes of perfection.

For children, Martin Jarvis reads the Just William books with a flair, warmth and beauty that are unrivalled. His rendering of the voice of Violet Elizabeth Bott (who will scream and scream and scream until she’s sick) is heaven itself.

The Poisoned King by Katherine Rundell (Bloomsbury Children’s Books, £8.99) is out now.

Laura Dockrill

What book would you always recommend?

The book I always recommend is Lemn Sissay’s memoir My Name Is Why. He’s poured himself into it. It’s heartbreaking, devastating and poetic; and also life-affirming, beautiful and hopeful. Lemn writes like no one else. I love having the book near me, just looking at it on the shelf brings me comfort and peace.

Two Sisters by Laura Dockrill (HQ, £16.99) is out now.

Oliver Jeffers

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

I was not a big reader going through school. It always felt like homework.

When I went to my first year at art college, the lecturer said we should fill our minds as much as possible, and gave a list of 100 books that we should read before graduating.

One of them I’d heard about from US friends – To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. I was hooked from the start.

Brilliantly written with a powerful punch, it was the first grown-up book I read by choice. And now I go through about one a month.

Kate Mosse

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

On a wet and dismal family summer holiday in north Devon in the 1970s, we were cooped up indoors with the Calor gas heater pumping in the kitchen and permanently damp clothes drying on a rack in the hallway.

Bored, I raided a bookcase and pulled out an old Fontana paperback. On the cover was a 1920s candlestick telephone, a scrap of paper with a scribbled address, a pistol and a tube of artist’s red paint. The author’s name was printed in capitals across the top and the intriguing title set beneath. 

The Murder At The Vicarage by Agatha Christie was my first murder mystery, the first ‘grown-up’ book I discovered for myself. Curled up on the sofa, deaf to the pleas of my sisters to come and play, it was the beginning of a love affair with Miss Marple and St Mary Mead that has never faded. 

Autumn by Kate Mosse (Hodder Press, £16.99) is out on September 10.

Ben Miller

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

The first really grown-up book I remember reading was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I loved the atmospheric opening and how genuinely chilling it felt. Jim Hawkins is the son of an innkeeper, and one day a mysterious sailor takes lodging in his family’s inn.

It’s soon clear that he’s a pirate in hiding, and before long other equally terrifying pirates arrive in search of the treasure map he’s guarding.

They fail, of course, and the map ends up in Jim’s hands, beginning one of the greatest adventures ever written.

It was the first book that showed me villains didn’t have to be simple. Long John Silver is charming, funny, brave and utterly ruthless. And a lot more likeable than the respectable Englishmen who set sail to claim the treasure for themselves.

A Very Dangerous Pursuit by Ben Miller (HarperCollins, £20) is out now.

Peter James

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

I first read Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock when I was 14.

As a kid growing up in Brighton, with dreams of becoming a writer, when I finished it I made myself a promise that one day I would try to write a crime novel set in Brighton that was just a fraction as good. This timeless thriller has so many of the elements that make a great novel: flawed but captivating characters, a terrific hook of an opening line, a profound study of evil and religious sin, and a psychologically dark but deeply satisfying last line.

Written in 1937, it’s as fresh to me today as when I first read it.

The Hawk Is Dead by Peter James (Pan, £9.99) is out now.

Adam Kay

Is there a book you preferred as an audiobook?

Turning the pages of a good autobiography is always like stumbling across juicy gossip, but hearing it from the horse’s mouth is even better. And when that horse is Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s monstrous, yet genius, creation – you’ve struck gold.

I, Partridge: We Need To Talk About Alan sees our hero moulding his mundane past into a misery-filled moneyspinner. When in the car listening to Partridge’s deadpan memories of pathetic successes and catastrophic failures, I was frequently worried I was going to laugh myself into the central reservation and the path of an oncoming juggernaut.

A Particularly Nasty Case by Adam Kay (Orion, £10.99) is out now.

L. J. Ross

What was the first ‘grown-up’ book you loved?

The Far Pavilions, by M. M. Kaye. I read it during the long summer holidays when I was 11, finding myself engrossed in the coming- of-age story of a boy caught between two cultures in India during the last days of the Raj.

I’ve not visited India yet, but the settings were so richly described it’s as if the heat, aromas and mountains leapt off the pages. It was an unforgettable lesson which I still remember as an author each time I sit down to write.