On Saturday 5 March, a million books will be given away across the UK in the first ever World Book Night. We asked writers which books they give as gifts and which they've been most pleased to receive. And children's authors recommended books to give to children

David Almond

I'd give a child any book by the amazing Cressida Cowell. Best to start with How to Train Your Dragon (Hodder) and then go on to the whole series that recounts the life and adventures of Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III. The books are exciting, barmy, hilarious, clever, original, accessible, heartwarming and wonderfully well written.

Margaret Atwood

The book I most often give as a gift is The Gift, by Lewis Hyde (Canongate). I keep four or five copies around the house at all times, for swift giving to people who need them. Most often they are artists of one kind or another, and are worrying about the disconnect between what they do and how hard they work, and how little money they make. Hyde's book explains the differences between the money economy in which we think we live, and the gift economy, in which we also live. Gifts – including artistic gifts – travel in mysterious ways, but travel they must, or else they die. The Gift is essential reading for anyone who has embarked on this journey. (It also inspired the creators of World Book Night. That is one of its gifts.)

John Banville

The most fascinating and most beautifully produced book I have come across in some years was given to me by a friend this Christmas past. Microscripts, by Robert Walser, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions/Christine Burgin), is a thing like no other, a transcription of Walser's tiny stories that he wrote in maniacally tiny handwriting, the letters no more than a millimetre high, so that an entire story would fit on the back of a matchbox. The deciphering of the script, by Werner Morlang and Bernhard Echte, was a triumph of scholarly tenacity, and this edition, designed by Christine Burgin, is a triumph of the book-maker's art.

William Boyd

On the whole I prefer to give a book token and let people make their own selection, but my book-gift of choice more often than not tends to be Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics). It is a unique novel – taking the form of hundreds of pages of footnotes to a 999-line epic poem in rhyming couplets. It's very funny, as well as being very brilliant. No one else could have written it and no one could ever hope to write anything similar. So I give it, I suppose, both as a kind of a test and a mark of respect, the subtext being: I hope you appreciate this extraordinary book and also that I think you are the type of cultured person with a fully functioning sense of humour who will.

Raymond Briggs

The best book I received as a child was William the Outlaw, by Richmal Crompton (Macmillan). I remember sitting by the fire in the kitchen and laughing so much I almost fell off the chair. My mother got slightly alarmed thinking I was having a fit. Today, I have an almost complete collection of the William books; their crackpot humour never dates and is as good as the Goons.

Anthony Browne

The one book I would give to a child is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick by the American writer and illustrator Chris Van Allsburg (Andersen), an extraordinary, unique picture book with a brilliant premise. The fictional introduction – the only piece of text longer than two sentences – explains that the pictures in the book are the articles of an unsolved mystery. Thirty years ago a man called Harris Burdick approached a children's book publisher, explaining that he had written 14 stories. Rather than burden the publisher with his entire body of work, he brought just one picture from each story, under each of which he had written the title and a brief caption for the illustration. The publisher was fascinated by the pictures and told Burdick that he would like to see the stories in their entirety as soon as possible. Burdick agreed to bring them to him the next day. But he didn't show up. For years, the publisher tried desperately to track him down, without success. Harris Burdick had mysteriously disappeared and all that was left of him were the 14 mesmerising pictures.

The rest of the book shows us the strange black and white illustrations with their titles and captions. Each one is a superb, imaginative work of art. Having set himself up with the inspired introduction, Van Allsburg was then at liberty to produce a series of drawings entirely from his imagination, free from the limitations of a traditional narrative. The result is a series of implied narratives that are as enthralling as the child's imagination chooses them to be. I have often talked about the importance of leaving gaps between the pictures and the text for children to fill in with their own imaginations. In the case of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, the gaps are cavernous.

AS Byatt

I particularly like giving books to my literary granddaughter, who is going to read English at university next year. Things like the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, or the poems of Wallace Stevens, or Keats's letters. Or Alice Oswald's The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile (Faber). I remember starting my own library of poetry at her age, and I still have those books. I also send her things like Angela Carter's anthology Wayward Girls and Wicked Women (Virago) – short, sharp stories to read in between A level studies.

Julia Donaldson

I would give Days with Frog and Toad, by Arnold Lobel (Harper). This is one of four books, each containing five short stories about a pair of amphibian friends. Frog is the straight guy and Toad is the comically cantankerous half of the duo. He endears himself to readers because he embodies so many human foibles, such as laziness, fear and attachment to routine. (And his frequent exclamations of "Blah!" get children hooting with laughter, so perhaps it's not the ideal bedtime choice.) In my favourite story, "The List", Toad makes a list of Things To Do and then refuses to do anything when it blows away. (He can't chase after it because that wasn't on the list.) I know just how he feels.

Roddy Doyle

I think I was 10. I was having a party. The weather was good, so my mother was keeping us all outside, so we'd break nothing and get sick on the grass. One of my friends handed me a present. He looked a bit embarrassed. I knew what it was before I opened it. A book.

Books weren't presents. I loved books, but they were a bit like food. I loved chicken, but a leg in wrapping paper would have been a huge disappointment. But my mother was looking, so I thanked him and tore off the paper. Great Expectations. I eventually read it. Pip in the graveyard, the escaped convict – more than 40 years later, I'm still reading Dickens.

Margaret Drabble

The best book I've ever been given is the complete six-volume edition of Van Gogh's letters last Christmas, but the book I kept on giving to my grandchildren when they were small was Dr Seuss's The Sneetches (HarperCollins). I gave them all lots of copies until I was told to stop. I loved this book so much, I wanted them to love it too. Dr Seuss is so amusing and egalitarian and free-thinking and so unlike all the more respectable English books I was given and liked as a child. Green Eggs and Ham was pretty good too, but the Sneetches were best. They should be compulsory reading for all warring nations.

Dave Eggers

I find myself recommending Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun (Harper Perennial), about the Biafran war, all the time. It's ideal for people who are are looking for the scope and breadth of Tolstoy, or Chekhov, Edward P Jones or even Steinbeck. She has the kind of unwavering command of history and humanity that puts her in that company.

Tim Flannery

My all-time favourite book gift is Oliver Lawson Dick's edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives (Penguin). You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England, and with the lives of the likes of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Harvey and Lady Herbert revealed "unto ye cunny", it was far too dangerous a work to publish until long after Aubrey's death.

The book I've been most pleased to receive is Tomás O'Crohan's 1929 classic The Islandman (Oxford). It was a present from my great friend Adam Wynn, and what a classic tale it is, telling vividly of the last remnants of a truly tribal Europe.

Neil Gaiman

The book I give most often is Tom Phillips's gloriously strange A Humument (Thames & Hudson). I do not know how to describe it to people – art book? Novel? Proto-graphic novel? It is unique: a mundane and gloomily worthy Victorian novel called A Human Document, recreated, reinvented and retold, page by page, into the adventures of a man named Toge. Each page has been painted into, cut up. The original novel is still visible, but now there's a mad, allusive tale of life on top of it, filled with gnomic, haiku-like texts and paintings. It even has a sex scene. Whatever it is, it makes me happy.

John Gray

"Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text." So writes Fernando Pessoa in the 148th note of The Book of Disquiet (Penguin, edited and translated by Richard Zenith), a unique text composed from scraps that the elusive Portuguese writer left in a large trunk; it was first published in 1982, nearly 50 years after his death. Writing under the guise of a series of alter egos or "heteronyms", Pessoa established himself as one – in fact, several – of Portugal and Europe's greatest poets. If you're looking for plot and character or a message of some kind, The Book of Disquiet is not for you. If you're bored with such conventional fictions, it may be the book you've always been looking for.

Mark Haddon

The book I most often give away is Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (Vintage). As the subtitle describes it, it is "A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years". At root it is an explanation of why Eurasians run the world: not because of any innate racial superiority but because of blunt geographical and biological facts. It's easy for societies to move east or west between similar climates, for example, but very hard for societies to migrate north and south (you don't cross the Sahara on a whim in search of good farmland). The book is also packed with solutions to old unanswered questions as well as intriguing questions you'd never thought of asking. Why did Aztecs die of Spanish diseases while the Spanish seemed immune to Aztec ones? Why can't you train a leopard to hunt? How the hell did anyone find Pitcairn Island, let alone tell anyone else about it?

The book I've most enjoyed receiving as a gift is Full Moon, by Michael Light (Cape), which is full of big, beautiful, digitally restored photographs of the Apollo missions. I think it's very difficult to believe completely in the fact that men have travelled to the moon until you read this book – the crispness of the focus, the sheer physical detail, bolts and tubes and scratched glass, the dirtiness of the lunar surface. Perhaps I'm still a 12-year-old boy at heart, but I can't open this book without a kind of ache, an almost religious realisation that there really is somewhere else.

Mohsin Hamid

The book I most often give is Pereira Maintains by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi, translated by Patrick Creagh (Canongate). It's an amazing novel: a political thriller, a touching romance, deliciously compressed and formally intriguing. I give it because it's a pleasure to read and among the books I love it's the one that most people have never heard of. (It's also one of the books I've been most pleased to receive as a gift, in San Francisco a decade ago, for all the same reasons.)

Charlie Higson

I would give a child any of Andy Stanton's Mr Gum books (Egmont) – they are wildly funny and inventive and play around with the whole idea of what a book is and how a story is told. Any author who creates a billionaire gingerbread man called Alan Taylor deserves to win the Nobel prize for literature. The book I was most pleased to receive when I was a kid was a collection of Greek myths and legends. I've always loved these stories and they're the basis of nearly every story told since then. They appealed to me as boy because there's a pleasing lack of morality to them and lots of fighting.

Eric Hobsbawm

I was once, a long long time ago, given WH Auden's Look, Stranger! (Faber), just published, as a birthday present. That is the book gift I remember most vividly.

Mary Hoffman

If the child were 8-12 years old, I think I would choose Louis Sachar's Holes (Bloomsbury). This is a perfectly constructed book as well as being exciting, funny and full of suspense. You know you are in safe hands from the opening line: "There is no lake at Camp Green Lake." It's a real writer's book, giving tremendous pleasure to an adult who appreciates Sachar's skill. But it's equally enjoyable by a child reader – a winner all round.

Michael Holroyd

The book I most often give as a present is A High Wind in Jamaica, by Richard Hughes (Vintage Classics). A superficial reason is that, owing to a generous moment of confusion by Royal Mail, I have several copies in a handsome Folio Society edition. But the real reason is that I consider it a much-overlooked and undervalued novel, inappropriately eclipsed perhaps by William Golding's Lord of the Flies. On one level it's an exciting adventure story with great storms and earthquakes, terrific animals, unruly children and some dubious pirates. What more, when young, could you want? But all this coexists with another narrative, darker and more sophisticated, complex and tragic. You can read this book over again and have read a different novel.

Anthony Horowitz

If there was anything I hated receiving as a child, it was a book token. I had a couple of namby-pamby aunts who always gave me book tokens, a present almost purposely designed to remind me how thick and illiterate I was. There was always the expectation that I would buy a "good" book – rather than a Beano annual. And anyway I often lost the wretched thing long before I got anywhere near a shop. But I loved receiving books and still remember unwrapping Andrew Lang's Tales of Troy (Wordsworth) one Christmas day. It instantly opened the world of myth and legend for me. I absolutely loved the adventures of Ulysses, the death of Achilles, the rivalry of the gods, the construction of the wooden horse that ended the nine long years of war. Myths could be seen as the first great stories of our civilisation, and Lang told them very well (with excellent illustrations). This was the start of an enthusiasm that has lasted to this day. I still hate book tokens though.

Lewis Hyde

I went to college in Minnesota in the mid-1960s. There were a number of talented poets in the state at the time, including Robert Bly and John Berryman. We young writers used to hang around them just to see how they held their pens, what kind of paper they used, what they ate for breakfast.

This is an example, it turns out, of a Hindu practice, darshan, meaning to lay eyes on or to behold. Young artists need to be able to contemplate their more accomplished elders. Something is transmitted by sight alone. More is transmitted, of course, by the work of art itself, by the poem spoken or in print. And, to be sure, there needs to be an actual cash economy of literature if writers and publishers are to survive. But the cash economy is useless unless the gift of art is there as well, doing its strange, transformative work.

The young Bob Dylan lived in Minnesota a few years before I got there and he has since written about the day in Minneapolis when he first heard Woody Guthrie recordings: "I listened all afternoon . . . as if in a trance . . . feeling more like myself than ever before".

Myself, I remember that Bly once gave me a little pamphlet of translations he'd made of poems by Issa. Here's one of them:

Now listen, you watermelons –

if any thieves come –

turn into frogs!

The first page of this pamphlet contained a simple declaration: "This booklet is a gift, and is not to be sold." Years later I myself was to write a book on gift exchange and art. Perhaps the seed of that work was planted by my having been lucky enough to witness an older man's generosity.

PD James

I never give books, only book tokens, which I give frequently for birthdays and at Christmas to young and old members of my family. There would in any case be no book that I would most often give, as each book has to be chosen individually for the recipient. The book I have been most pleased to receive was The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, which was awarded to me as a short story prize at the Cambridge and County High School for Girls on 12 November 1936.

Hari Kunzru

As so much of my reading life takes place onscreen, I've increasingly begun to fetishise books as objects. I find a lot of gifts in rare-book dealers – a first of BS Johnson's The Unfortunates as a wedding present for two writers, and an early edition of The Lord of the Rings for a childhood friend. I've given several people books in Collins's Britain in Pictures series, published as a patriotic exercise during the second world war. These little books survey everything from novelists to mountaineers. Texts were written by major figures such as Edith Sitwell, John Betjeman, John Piper and Cecil Beaton. They're beautiful and inexpensive, and you can always find one that's appropriate for the recipient.

John Lanchester

About 10 years ago I had a conversation with Jonathan Franzen about writers' books, in the sense of books particularly admired by other writers but not, for whatever reason, as widely famous as they deserved to be. He mentioned Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson, and since then it's become the book I've given away more often than any other. It's a collection of linked short stories, Johnson's first; before it he was best known as a poet. It's a beautifully fresh fiction, whose main character is a young, junky alcoholic, and it's an extraordinary, Blakean piece of poetic prose – that being one of the hardest things for any writer to achieve without succumbing to self-indulgence.

Another book I greatly admire and have often given away, and even more often recommended, is John Keegan's The Face of Battle (Pimlico), about ordinary soldiers' experience of war down the centuries. For some reason I've had a very low level of uptake when it comes to people actually reading the book, maybe because the friends I've given it to tend to be anti-war types. But that's the point: the soldier's-eye-view makes this about as anti-war as a book can be.

Andrea Levy

In 1979 I was given a copy of The Women's Room, by Marilyn French (Virago) for my 23rd birthday. I had never really read a novel from start to finish before. I was made to read Dickens and George Eliot at school, which was such tough going for me that I believed reading fiction to be a form of torture. So I looked at this fat book and wondered if it might be useful as a door stop. But then I started to I read it and I was amazed. That experience changed me into a voracious reader. It was the most valuable present I have ever been given.

David Lodge

I possess a small black-bound copy of Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog!), by Jerome K Jerome, inscribed on the fly-leaf: "Happy Xmas to David, Love & Kisses, Auntie Eileen" and dated "Xmas 1944". I was nine years and eleven months old. Eileen was my mother's younger sister, a glamorous and exciting figure to me because she was working as a civilian secretary for the US army in recently liberated Paris. How she obtained the book, the 106th impression, printed in December 1944, and conveyed it to me I do not know. It quickly became one of my favourite books, which I read again and again, especially when comfort reading was required. I tended to skip the historical and topographical passages and revisit the comic set pieces. I have just read the first few pages again and almost immediately I was laughing aloud at the funniest description of hypochondria in all literature.

Many years later a Bulgarian postgraduate student who was writing a thesis about my novels wrote to ask me some questions, one of which was: "is your writing influenced by Jerome K Jerome?" It had never occurred to me before – I liked to answer this kind of question with such names as Joyce, Greene and Waugh, but I replied without hesitation, "Yes". I hope she got her PhD – she deserved it for that insight.

David Mitchell

Choosing the right gift-book is the art of the matchmaker – it must be tailored to the individual – and so there's no single book that I give to people habitually. Books that I have given to more than one person, however, include Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book (Bloomsbury), Minnesotan poet James Wright's The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press), Chekhov's A Life in Letters (Penguin) (his de facto memoir) and, most recently, Keith Richards's meaty, wise autobiography, Life (Weidenfeld & Nicolson).

The book I was most pleased to receive as a gift was Through the Looking-Glass. I was about 10, and my mum just left it in my bedroom, unannounced. I remember following the bizarrely staid Alice on her trippy quest (wondering why she never screams "You people are all total nutters!") until it was too dark to read any more.

Michael Moorcock

Apart from George Meredith's spectacular The Amazing Marriage (out of print for 80 years), the book I give away most frequently is probably One Last Mad Embrace, by Jack Trevor Story (Reinkarnation), once the Guardian's favourite and funniest columnist. Although The Trouble with Harry and Live Now, Pay Later are better known (and almost as funny), I believe Embrace to be his masterpiece, skilfully blending the real life of an impoverished movie writer with a hilariously fast-paced plot. It's impossible to tell where autobiography ends and invention begins, but it's safe to say that the more absurd and incredible the anecdote the more likely it is to derive from Story's own life. For some reason, books about lower middle-class or working-class life rarely stay in print, but Story's books have enough enthusiasts to be regularly reprinted and are pictures of an almost forgotten world of the 1950s and 60s.

The book I was most pleased to receive (as an adult) was The Exploits of Engelbrecht by Maurice Richardson, recently reprinted by Savoy Books with all the original brilliant illustrations from Lilliput magazine. The Surrealist Sporting Club's dwarf boxer mostly fights timepieces, but plays Mars at soccer, enjoys the night of the big witch shoot, looks in at a very long-running play at the Plant Theatre and goes 10 rounds with a grandfather clock. Absolutely original, incredibly funny. The new edition is also one of the most beautifully produced books around.

Andrew Motion

I don't have a regular giveaway book: I'm more likely to give something I happen to have read recently and liked. But if I were to have a regular . . . it would be Edward Thomas's Collected Poems (Faber). They don't make big claims, but they're stealthily commanding: a beautiful end in themselves, and a doorway to modern poetry. And being given something? The chance would be a fine thing. Anything by or about Tennyson is always very welcome (address supplied).

David Nicholls

The books we give change as we grow older. At university I presented The Rattle Bag to anyone who so much as looked at me, but two have remained constant over the years: Tender is the Night, by F Scott Fitzgerald (Penguin) and JD Salinger's Franny and Zooey (Penguin), two books that languish in the shadow of better-known works. In truth, Franny and Zooey is more of a gamble – I know some people find it precious and self-indulgent – but I'd be very wary of befriending anyone who wasn't moved by the last page of that beautiful book.

As to gifts I've received, I have a first edition of Philip Larkin's The Whitsun Weddings which would be at the top of my list in the event of that terrible hypothetical house-fire.

Michelle Paver

When I was about five years old, my father gave me Once Long Ago, by Roger Lancelyn Green for Christmas. At the time, I didn't own many hardbacks – mostly we got our books from the library – and this was the biggest, most beautiful book I'd ever owned. It's a marvellous collection of fairy stories from around the world: there's a man-eating Chinese monster who's a satisfyingly messy eater, an ancient Egyptian treasure thief, a terrifying Icelandic witch in a stone boat – and many more, all evocatively illustrated by the Czech artist Vojtech Kubasta. Although I didn't realise it at the time, each story is retold in a style that's in keeping with its source country, whether it's Sudanese, Polynesian, Japanese or Basuto.

I read it again and again. I don't think it's a coincidence that I've ended up delving into the myths of different cultures to create my own fairy tales. And it hasn't escaped my notice that the first story in the collection is an American Indian story called "The Boy and the Wolves".

Terry Pratchett

Some miscalculation a few years ago meant that we ended up with, I think, five copies of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. We didn't take any of them back to the shop, taking the view that even in the outside toilet you might find yourself wanting to know in a hurry about the correct usage of the Oxford comma. The experience led to a family pact, but generally Schott's Miscellany manages to get through twice. That is fine because in our house books are neither furnishings nor badges of learning; they are debris. Officially we have two libraries, which are defined as places where you store your old books while your new books pile up beside the bed. All library owners have to beware of the inveterate book borrower but I am a compulsive book lender and keep a stock of Gail Bell's The Poison Principle (Pan), and I'm down to my last copy of Dorothy Hartley's Food in England (Piatkus).

Annie Proulx

As I love Italian cuisine I have given away so many copies of that wonderful regional history of geography, people, particular dishes and foodstuffs by the Russian-born literary scholar Elena Kostioukovitch, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (Duckworth), that I rarely have a copy on hand for myself. Kostioukovitch is Umberto Eco's translator. The book is lavishly illustrated and gives great reading pleasure. For North American friends who share an interest in natural history, I have found nothing more gripping and readable than Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples (Penguin). For friends who are curious about New Mexico, the unique murder mysteries of Tony Hillerman featuring Navajo policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee give a detailed picture of the dry desert-mountain terrain of the American south-west.

Jonathan Raban

There's an element of missionary activity in giving a book to a friend. Of course you want to simply share your own excitement and pleasure in the text, but you also want to turn your friend into a fellow convert, an initiate in the faith. I like to give poetry anthologies to people who don't usually read poetry. It hardly matters which anthology: it might be Palgrave's Golden Treasury (Oxford), or Christopher Ricks's newish edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse, or Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney's The Rattle Bag (Faber). I imagine someone, grown slack in the habit of skimming a novel for its story or a newspaper column for its opinion, discovering, for the first time, the joy of patiently teasing out, say, the three stanzas of Keats's "Ode to Melancholy", word by word and line by line, over the course of a rapt hour or three.

Ian Rankin

When I was a student, a friend gave me the first two volumes of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (Arrow) for my birthday. I started reading the first book, thinking: not sure I'm going to like this. All snobby privilege and a world I won't be interested in. By volume two, I was hooked. Widmerpool and the others were such good company, and the writing was elegant and concise, so I bought the rest of the books in the series.

Michael Rosen

It all depends on the age of the child, but I think the tales that seem to work on so many levels for different ages are the Greek myths. I know of two very good retellings – Geraldine McCaughrean's and Terry Deary's – but the stories can be revisited in different ways at different times in our lives. This makes them great for sharing, too.

Meg Rosoff

My parents gave me Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time (Puffin) for my 11th birthday. The book features a geeky, intelligent child who also happens to be named Meg; she is overshadowed by a variety of cooler, more intelligent, academically successful characters. As part of the harrowing quest to find her scientist father, Meg is presented with the gift of her faults by the strange and tragic Mrs Whatsit. This was my first literary epiphany – it went against everything I'd ever been taught about being good and cultivating only positive qualities. Passion, stubbornness and rage save Meg in the end, and it was exactly those qualities that (after many trials and tribulations, and more than 30 years later) saved me.

Salman Rushdie

Three times in my life I've been given beautiful old editions of translations of the great story-compendium The Arabian Nights, or, to give it its proper title, The Thousand Nights and One Night. I'm delighted to have them all. This is the book that contains all other books; and its frame story, the tale of the teller of tales Scheherazade, is one of the great accounts of heroism in all of literature. It is the story of how a brilliant and brave woman escapes death at the hands of a monster – King Shahryar, who has been marrying, deflowering and then executing a virgin every night for three years – by telling him stories every night for the next two and three-quarter years and, improbably, civilising him. That she falls in love with the beast she tames is also the stuff of fable.

Lionel Shriver

The novel I've most enjoyed giving is A Home at the End of the World, by Michael Cunningham (Penguin). This author is better known for a later book, The Hours – naturally, since that one made it to the cinema. But this earlier novel has a rare warmth to it, without ever seeming sappy. It reconfigures the concept of family into something you can create, as opposed to a bunch of people you're simply stuck with. When I gave this book to my best friend in New York, he went out and bought – I kid you not – 10 more copies to give to other friends. Now that's a good present: one that multiplies itself.

Frances Stonor Saunders

The Door, by Magda Szabó, translated by Len Rix (Vintage) is a painfully beautiful account of the unlikely bond between two women – an (unnamed) married writer and her enigmatic cleaner, Emerence – who are separated by class, education, age and experience. The story develops into an emotionally and morally complex pas de deux, and holds you spellbound until the end.

You can read the novel again and again without really understanding how it works, but it conjures a psychological atmosphere that is unforgettable. It confirms the Hungarian Szabó as one of the great voices of 20th-century European literature. She died in 2007, aged 90, with a book in her lap.

Colm Tóibín

Over the 19 years since it first appeared, Eugene McCabe's novel Death and Nightingales (Vintage) is the book I have most often given to people. This is because of my own experience reading it – a sheer delight in the scenes and sentences, and then a realisation, a sudden jolt, as the enormity of what is really being planned and plotted becomes plain to both the heroine and the reader all at the same time. It is a wonderful gift because once someone has read this book, they become addicted to talking about it, describing their shock at the level of darkness and evil and sheer malevolence, as well as innocence, depicted and dramatised in its pages.

Rose Tremain

All writers have to steer a difficult course round the giving of their own books. When I started writing, I used to imagine that friends would gasp with joy at the arrival of a newly published Rose Tremain hardback, but I was mainly deluded. And I never had much luck with either of my parents or with my sister as readers. The gift of a new book was habitually followed by a deafening silence.

Perhaps this has made me wary of offering novels – my own, or anyone else's. What I most often give is the poetry that has really spoken to me, starting with my three favourite collected editions, Yeats, Auden and Larkin, and topping these up with a dash of Carol Ann Duffy, who seems to be the only serious modern poet who has remembered how to conjure the liberating power of laughter.

Sarah Waters

One of my most treasured possessions is a Picador paperback copy of the Grimms' Household Tales, given to me as an 11th birthday present in 1977. Until then, fairy stories had come to me via Disney, and were rather cosy affairs. These short, odd stories were much darker, and I found myself both troubled and thrilled by their macabre details: the talking horse's head in "The Goose-Girl", the endlessly growing noses in "The Nose Tree", the little girl who has to cut off a finger to make a key for her brothers' prison in "The Seven Ravens". The illustrations – by Mervyn Peake – only added to the beauty and the weirdness.

Like all powerful narratives, their meanings shift with each re-reading. I was wonderfully lucky to receive them at such a hungry, impressionable age. The book, when I handle it now, still feels like a gift.

Jacqueline Wilson

To a small child I'd give Lavender's Blue: A Book of Nursery Rhymes, compiled by Kathleen Lines and brilliantly illustrated by Harold Jones (Oxford). He uses a wonderful delicate colour palette of blue, sage green, lilac and apricot to create his own quirkily detailed dream-like world. You could pore over the pages every day for a year and still find fresh delights.

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