She had forgotten how many minutes of motherhood were devoted to this question, even before Edith's accident. Alive now? And now? The deeper Edith's sleep the shallower her life, it seemed. The extraordinary stillness of a sleeping baby! Look for a breath at the stomach, flush at the cheeks. Then Luetta would leave the room, come back. She lost hours to the question. Alive now, now, now?

It's hard to know which made me more aware of the impossibility of protecting children - having a child die or having had two live.

A Lucky Child is an extraordinary story, simply and beautifully told. Heartbreaking and thrilling, it examines what it means to be human, in every good and awful sense. Perhaps most amazingly of all, Thomas Buergenthal remembers and renders the small mysteries and grand passions of childhood, even a childhood lived under the most horrific circumstances.

I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too.

Ordinarily, I'd claim that I'd never write directly about my children, but the opening conversation of 'Peter Elroy' is a verbatim conversation that my children had that I just loved: morbid, funny, passionate, and obsessed with the truth of things - all natural qualities of children that I'd like my work to contain.