Frank Cottrell-Boyce: Books That Changed My Life

I could talk about this book forever! It’s a memoir by a really brilliant magician, Nate Staniforth, who has a belief in being able to do magic out of ordinary things. He has become a little jaded and disillusioned, so he takes himself to India to renew himself by taking his magic on the road.

I’m very privileged to have been a writer all my life, but it’s very difficult to stop it just being a job. You can lose touch with the joy of it. This book is about rediscovering the joy in your own talents. It’s about falling back in love with your craft, and finding magic in the ordinary. 

I won a copy of One Thousand and One Nights in a competition at school. It’s kind of the opposite of finding the magic in the ordinary—it’s all about extravagance and amazingness and bragging and lying. But I love it! It’s really about how storytelling can save your life. The narrator is a woman who’s facing a death sentence and is telling stories with these cliffhangers so that she won’t be killed. It’s a sort of book of wonders about how you can enchant someone with a story.

As a children’s writer you spend a lot of time in schools, telling stories to children who don’t necessarily want to be there, gathering them up into this moment of laughter or excitement or nervousness. One Thousand and One Nights celebrates that with this idea that you can confront someone who literally wants to kill you and you put a cliffhanger in place and they go, I’ll kill you tomorrow instead. It’s the greatest celebration of the power of storytelling I can think of.

This is just the funniest book. And it’s kind of about nothing. It’s just three blokes in a boat going down the Thames and not being very good at it. That’s all. There’s nothing clever about it. It’s just paying attention to the lovely details of ordinary life.

It’s so kind and so tender and it’s funnier than anything else. There’s pages and pages of failing to get through a lock gate or getting lost in a maze. You don’t need all these big twists and dramatic events to be funny, you can just be really overconfident that you can find your way out of a maze!

The Wonder Brothers by Frank Cottrell-Boyce (Macmillan Children's Books, £12.99) is available now