Queen Camilla comes from a family rich in colourful characters, from a runaway grandfather and a vanished aunt to a Romeo brother and a suicidal uncle. Her father, Bruce Shand, was a decorated soldier and wine merchant who wrote a single, moving autobiography.
Father's wartime memoir
Bruce Shand's book, published in 1990, details his unhappy early life, his exploits at Dunkirk and the 1942 Battle of El Alamein, and his capture by the Germans. He spent the rest of the war in Spangenburg prisoner-of-war camp near Frankfurt.
In the Western Desert, Winston Churchill pinned Shand's second Military Cross on his tunic. Shand was severely wounded after being surrounded by Field Marshal Rommel's army, and his account of the deaths of Sergeant Francis and Corporal Plant is harrowing.
Family of writers
Camilla's grandfather, Philip Morton Shand, wrote books on cinema, food, wine and architecture in the 1930s. He was a negligent father who almost never saw his son Bruce, but his work inspired his great-grandson Tom Parker Bowles to become a food critic.
Tom Parker Bowles, a regular on BBC's Masterchef, has produced ten foodie books so far. Camilla's husband Charles has authored or co-authored 17 books, and her grandfather managed at least eight.
Love of reading
Camilla has described her charity's mission to get people reading as 'more urgent than ever'. The Queen's Reading Room charity aims to promote reading and help people discover books, with authors like Peter James, Katherine Rundell and William Boyd backing the campaign.
The charity also donates books and has created shared-reading programmes for organisations supporting people experiencing homelessness and domestic abuse. Its online content is free and has collected a community of hundreds of thousands of book-lovers worldwide.
In the BBC documentary The Book That Changed My Life, broadcast on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer on October 14, Camilla will talk for the first time about her father's autobiography, which she describes as "a huge load off his mind" because he had never talked to his family about his wartime experiences.
