Besides his pioneering novels of adolescence, including the 1999 Carnegie Medal winner, Postcards from No Man’s Land, Aidan Chambers has made a major contribution to the literature for and about young people and their reading. Formerly editor of the Topliners series - the first reluctant reader series to produce appealing paperback originals - and co-founder of Turton amp; Chambers, which brought translated fiction to English readers, he has also written the inspirational Booktalk, and is a much-travelled lecturer and speaker. His experience gives this collection of seven substantial essays a distinctive slant.

In his own novels and those he has edited, Chambers is adamant that developing readers deserve more than instantly appealing crowd-pleasers; they need fiction to extend their reading, thinking and language awareness. Sections on translating give insights into the production of two Turton amp; Chambers books: Johnny, My Friend, by Swedish author Peter Pohl, and Zeppelin, by the Norwegian Tormod Haugen.

The work of translating is examined closely: samples from Johnny, My Friend, illustrate Anthea Bell’s point that “it is the spirit rather than the letter that the translator pursues”, and show stages in a process most take for granted.

Compared to other European countries, the UK publishes a tiny percentage of translated books, and those that do appear receive scant attention from reviewers. Sadly, Turton amp; Chambers’s sales were so low that the partners could not afford to continue; yet the books mentioned above were acclaimed far beyond their native Scandinavia. Though all children now study literature from various cultures as part of the national curriculum, many works of excellence in other languages continue to be unavailable in English.

Elements of autobiography make this a varied and anecdotal collection. “Pick up a Penguin” charts Chambers’s development as a devourer of fiction, from the six-year-old who coloured the pictures because reading was too difficult, through the moment of epiphany when “everything came together and I heard voices talking in my head”, to his own collection in his teens of the new Penguin paperbacks: “democratic, unthreateningly attractive, affordableI how much I owe that extraordinary publishing phenomenon”. Aged 15, he bought Sons and Lovers. Finishing it, he decided that “what I was - not wanted to be or would like to be, but was - was a writer”.

When we first meet Jacob, the hero of Postcards, he has just visited Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, and is dismayed that others feel they know her as intimately as he does. Chambers’s essay “Anne Frank’s Pen” shows how extraordinary a book her diary is. Several extracts show her increasing assurance as an author, and the conscious artistry with which she shapes incidents for her imagined reader and confidante. Reading such a book, Chambers concludes, “we not only come intimately closer to the consciousness of another person than is possible in any other way but are also engaged with our own consciousness more intricately and more actively than by any other means. This is why we often feel when we have read a great bookI that we have grown, that we are more aware of some aspect of our self, of other people, of life itself, than we were before.” Anne Frank’s pen, he writes, “helped to make her what she is. Not what she was.”

The final essay, “The Future of the Book”, further explores the relationships of author, text and reader. Chambers has much to say about the irreplaceable activity of reading text in book form, and argues that its future is assured. Chambers the writer makes me want to write; Chambers the attentive reader makes me want to read. Enjoy this collection for its range, eloquence and wisdom, and for its unique “companionship”.

LINDA NEWBERY