★★★

Between the ages of eleven and thirteen, I read a lot of classic sci-fi novels that my dad had bought in the 1970s and 1980s and then relegated to a box in the attic. These were my first ‘grown up’ books and together they opened up a whole world for me, but I haven’t read them since. However, a few weeks back someone donated a treasure trove of these novels to the book stall at the village fete (not my dad’s copies, I hasten to add), and I saw the perfect opportunity to revisit the stories which had had such an impression on me as a child. First up on the nostalgia road-trip was Dragonflight, which I remembered with great fondness. Inevitably, it didn’t quite stand up to the test of time, but – having forgotten virtually everything about it except the characters’ names and the dragons – I still found it exciting and fast-paced, with a clever blend of sci-fi and fantasy at its heart.

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