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slash Radio 4. Hello, welcome with me today, Philip Pullman, author most famously of the award-winning trilogy, His Dark Materials, and who's currently working, as he has been for several years years on a massive companion novel called The Book of Dust.

With Philip, the journalist and feminist Caroline Criardo Perez,

whose campaigning led to Jane Austen's being chosen as the face of the new 10-pound note,

and whose book, Do It Like a Woman and Change the World, came out this summer.

Philip, would you start your choice of a good read?

Yes, well, I was attracted to this book because of the author Tuva Janssen,

who is, of course, the creator of the Moomins,

whom I fell in love with, I mean the Moomans I fell in love with,

when I must have been about nine at Battersea Public Library.

These are sort of blobby children's characters.

Yeah, yes.

The first sight they look like little hippopotamuses or something.

But it's a whole fantastical world that she's created.

A world set in, well, in Finland, because that's where she comes from and that's where her stories are set.

It's a world of little creatures.

She's very, very good at little creatures, insects and things like that.

And they have astonishing adventures.

And the thing I love about the mummins is the affection they have for one another.

And the sweet tolerance with which they put up with

all sorts of things, volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, doesn't seem to worry them at all. They're,

they look on it all with the spirit of adventure. And this book I've chosen, sculptor's daughter,

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