Rachel Hore's fascinating novels move between the past and the present. Her latest The House on Bellevue Gardens is set in London now and in the early 1960s.

Best-selling author Rachel Hore's previous novels include The Glass Painter's Daughter, which was shortlisted(入围) for the 2010 Romantic Novel of the Year award, and A Gathering Storm, which was shortlisted for the 2012 Historical Novel of the Year award.

Here, she shares three books that made an impact on her life.

Orlando

by Virginia Woolf

Reading Orlando for the first time in my late teens gave me a wonderful sense of freedom and the possibilities that a life full of books can offer. Forever youngOrlando possesses "the strength of a man and a woman's grace".

He lives through four centuries and has many disguises; sometimes he even changes his gender.

It was an excellent literary work through history that excited and inspired me.

Flight Behaviour

by Barbara Kingsolver

I've read many of Barbara Kingsolver's novels, including her well-known The Poisonwood Bible, admiring how easily she writes about the power and beauty of the natural world, of which humanity is a dependent part.

I particularly love Flight Behaviour because she engages the reader easily with an ambitious subject for fiction — climate change.

Her story makes us all care about what we are doing to our world.

The Hawk in the Rain

by Ted Hughes

We were given The Thought Fox to read at school and I was so deeply impressed with its central image of the fox in the snow inspiring the poem that I spent that week's money on the book it appears in. I read and re-read it and was amazed!

I loved the writer's technique of description, as well as the energy, the violence and the sensuousness (敏感) of those poems.

Everyone should have their ‘discovery of poetry' moment, and mine was Ted Hughes.