ANNE FINE'S books get talked about. She chooses topics pertinent to the lives of her readers - such as how life is different if you're a girl rather than a boy, explored in Bill's New Frock - written in a fit of rage after encountering sexism in a school.

Pertinent lessons abound: that parenting isn't easy and some parents just can't take the pressure - a new understanding that eases the pain for young Simon Martin whose father abandons him in Flour Babies; that, however badly behaved children or adults can be, no one is born evil (The Tulip Touch); and that, however laced with fun and farce, life is difficult for parents and children after a marital separation (Madame Doubtfire, subsequently made into the film Mrs Doubtfire starring Robin Williams).

"In a comedy like Madame Doubtfire, under between and inside the jokes, I'm trying to show them that it's difficult to be the mother in this family. It's difficult to be the father. It's difficult to be Lydia, and Christopher, and little Natalie.

"Over the length of the book the reader gets to see how everyone feels. And he watches them survive. Still cracking jokes. Still trying, by their lights, however dim," Fine explains.

A tiny passage in Crummy Mummy and Me shows a 10 year old girl wondering why her mother won't lend her 10p to pay her weekly contribution to the class's sponsored elk at the local zoo.

Moments such as this have sparked off reallife impassioned debates over family tables and in schools. "Not just the are zoos wrong for sentient animals debate. But also whether Minna's mother should have, just this once, put her daughter's feelings and convenience before her own principles," she says.

Somewhat controversially, Anne Fine ardently believes that it has to be a book. "Television and film won't do. Books can explore emotion. They can be reflective. They can expose conscience and motivation, morals and inner concerns.

"They do not simply show you what happened next at the producer's speed."

It could be argued that this overstates the case. Witness the depletion of the Kleenex box in select company during emotionally charged films. Remember your desire that your mother or father see a certain movie to understand for once how you really feel.

Just as we often want to get the right book into the right person's hands at the right time, there are also films which we'll want certain people to see - and we'll pray they understand them.

But Fine stands by her views on the book film debate. "Inner motivation," she maintains, "is incomprehensible in film. In books it is the job of the writer to explain exactly why this man poisoned his mother, that woman left her husband and this child kissed the frog.

Fiction, she says, enables children to explore their own problems and feelings and to put their fears in perspective. Readers can test themselves against the lives they might have to live, for instance if they lost a parent or failed all their exams.

"In a book exploring another family's experience, light can shed, sideways, on their own.

"They close the book and can't help thinking: `if a wimp like him can confess to his parents and face the music, I probably could too'."

As for kids' often infuriating literary taste, Fine says that "books for children are like sex for adults - it's is a mystery what turns them on".

THE BEST BOOKS, she says, are pleasurable to read and help with living. Readability and fearless honesty are their hallmarks. Facing a frank and honest portrayal of human emotion is the best way to come to an understanding of ourselves.

Good books increase the sense of the complexity of things. They make you think.

And, as the film Shadowlands put it: "We read to know that we are not alone."

Fine points out that since the first episode of Coronation Street over 30 years ago, viewers have spent a cumulative total of well over four and a half million years watching it.

At those too busy watching television to read, she thrusts the words of Jane Austen: "Oh! It's only a novel... only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human natare, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language."