Het Kwintet van David Hair

I grew up in smalltown and rural New Zealand, in what we call a 'pakeha' family - that's European/white, generally of British extract, living alongside the native Maori. The media/culture we received was part-British, part-American, and part-Australasian (New Zealand and Australian), as a glance at the pop charts of 1970s New Zealand would tell you. We pakeha have a schizophrenic cultural identity, little pieces of everyone else merging to form something that is hard to pin down as 'ours'. It is no coincidence that Maori culture is so prevalent in New Zealand cultural displays, as we pakeha brought little from elsewhere, shedding the trappings of Europe as we emigrated to the South seas. The sad 60s-70s joke that New Zealand culture was 'rugby, (horse-) racing and beer' was amusing because it was true.

The books we read were therefore from diverse places, and said more about how other places lived than how we did. When I was growing up we pakeha were for the most part yet to embrace the native Maori culture as our own, but the beginnings were there: schools were running 'Maori Studies' classes but they were optional, and we all had a smattering of Maori words in our daily vocabulary. I didn't think of myself as anything other than a New Zealander though; we had our own history quite distinct from Europe, and home-grown heroes like Charles Upham (VC & Bar), John Walker (athlete) and of course the All Blacks to look up to.

This brings me to the first book in my five; Myths and Legends of Maoriland by A W Reed, a retelling for children of the main Maori legends. I read it at a time I was also reading mythology books from other places, and I was proud that we had our own mythic heroes to stand alongside King Arthur and Robin Hood and the rest: Maui, Tawhaki and Hatupatu (my favourite) were the demigods and heroes that peopled my imagination when travelling through the New Zealand landscape as a child, and who fuelled the ideas behind my first novel, The Bone Tiki (a YA novel set in New Zealand).

The first YA book that captivated me was however quintessentially English; The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner is a wonderful blend of the real world and the mythic countryside, incorporating English and Norse legend in a brilliant tale of hidden magic, and it still affects me.

Next came The Lord of the Rings; I guess it's a cliché for fantasy writers, but I read it in my early teens and was totally transported; Tolkien changed my reading habits for a lifetime.

I'm a huge fan of American writer Tim Powers, whose speciality is in blending the mythic with the historical in a crazy, heady brew. I can't pick between The Drawing of the Dark (the siege of Vienna complete with djinns, trolls, King Arthur Reborn and dark magic) and The Anubis Gates (a time travel novel with the most brilliantly moving ending ever).

All of these were from a long time ago now, and were part of what forged my taste in reading; more recently I've enjoyed immensely the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher; Terry Pratchett's Discworld books, Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series and many one-off books like The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (also historical fiction); but the book with the greatest claim to being my favourite of recent years is simply called 'Q' by a collective of Italian writers writing as 'Luther Blissett' - it's a historical spy thriller set in the Protestant Reformation. History, action, mystery, and wonderfully written. Seek it out!

De Brug der Getijden: Water & Vuur (The Moontide Quartet: Mage's Blood) van uitgeverij Luitngh-Sijthoff is nu verkrijgbaar