Bella Pollen

Bella Pollen is a writer and journalist who contributes to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Telegraph, Harpers and Queen and the Observer, whose latest novel is Midnight Cactus. She says that she has a 'magpie approach' to reading and tends to pick up all sorts of things, and often reads several at a time. Here are her current favourites.

"Tschiffely's Ride is about a Swiss school teacher who lives in Buenos Aires in the 1920s, who makes the 10,000 miles journey to Washington on horseback and wrote about his journey. The book I'm writing at the moment is about a Mexican cowboy who's ridden from Alaska down to the Mexican border, and I love them both because they are incredibly romantic notions; this idea of impossible journeys.

My second book is one I'm reading to my daughter which concerns a romantic figure in the form of a slightly deformed mouse called Despereaux, which means disappointment. It's a wonderful book because it's very dark and it concerns torture and treachery and child abuse and sorrow and broken hearts…about a mouse who discovers literature because he doesn't want to eat books like other mice; he wants to read them. A fantastic book.

Carl Hiasson's Skin Tight is a classic. It's about he plastic surgery industry and also the advent of reality TV. A comic thriller - it takes the idea to their most insane extreme - and now, 15 years after it was written, it seems very ahead of it s time."

Tschiffely's Ride by Aime Tschiffely: RRP £12.99
The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread: RRP £6.99
Skin Tight by Carl Hiasson: RRP £6.99