"Perhaps all the best books," wrote Robert Westall in Signal, "start by being written for only one child, and that child very close to you. They start when the child-within-the-author turns to the real child and says, 'Come away with me and I will show y...

In Competition No. 2339 you were invited to provide an extract from the diary of someone travelling with a memorable aunt. It's odd that apart from Auntie BBC this relative is not traditionally conventional, respectable or even likeable. Autolycus sings of 'tumbling in...

Paulette Ramsay. Aunt Jen. Oxford: Heinemann, 2002. Pb. 105 pages. Paulette Ramsay's deceptive novella tells the story of Sunshine, a young girl growing up in rural Jamaica in the 1960s to 70s. 'Deceptive'-because the simple prose of Ramsay's child narrator (Sunshine herself,...