What’s your favourite book?

It’s always been a tough question to answer for me. What are the criteria? The Lord of the Rings is a superlative work of creation. Rubicon is as great a work of historical narrative as I’ve ever read. The Lies of Locke Lamora impressed me more than any novel in the past ten years and genuinely shocked me with one of its many twists. Planetary and V for Vendetta are superbly well-crafted comics series. I could dig in to my library and make an argument for many more of the books in there.

But if I’m allowed to narrow it down to the book that has given me the most joy, then the answer’s easier. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett are two of my favourite authors, their storytelling skills and mastery of wordplay having made me smile more often than most, and when they collaborated to create a novel, they both surpassed themselves. That novel, Good Omens, reduced me to even more helpless giggling than Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide series ever managed.

The news, then, that Pratchett and Gaiman are adapting Good Omens as a six-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, just fills me with even greater joy. Add to that the fact that the team behind it was also responsible for last year’s wonderful adaptation of Gaiman’s Neverwhere and joy levels are starting to reach near-terminal levels. Anything else? Oh yes, how about the amazing Peter Serafinowicz as co-lead Crowley, “an angel who did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards”.*

Needless to say, a radio-centric Christmas can’t come soon enough. I may just have to dig out my very-well thumbed copy of the original novel** and remind myself of just how good it is in order to prepare myself…

*He hadn’t meant to fall. He’d just hung around with the wrong people.

**It was first published in 1990. That’s … quite a while ago.