On your nightstand now:
I've just started Neel Mukherjee's beautiful debut novel, A Life Apart. It's delicate, compelling and already breaking my heart. I'm really enjoying Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. Jackie Kay's short story collection, Wish I Was Here--I'm trying to ration myself but I can't seem to read just one story. They're fresh and funny and full of compassion, and I have to gobble down five in a row. I'm reading Jim Crace's The Gift of Stones really, really slowly. It's more like poetry than prose. It's extremely evocative, totally compelling and I want to make it last as long as I can.
Favorite book when you were a child:
My absolute favorite was Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh. I adored Harriet with all her bravery and tactless incompetence. I carried a spiralbound notebook round with me for a while and crouched down by parked cars trying to spot Interesting Things, but I never developed a spy route, or dressed up as an onion in a pageant.
Your top five authors:
I have lots of top threes. Top three repeatedly read: Sara Paretsky, for the V.I. Warshawski novels; Cynthia Voigt, for Homecoming; Margaret Mahy, for The Changeover. Top three late-20th-century dazzling prose writers: Michael Ondaatje (for In the Skin of a Lion), Annie Proulx (for The Shipping News), Anne Michaels (for Fugitive Pieces). Top three writers of compelling tales: Sarah Waters, C.J. Sansom, Barbara Kingsolver (for The Poisonwood Bible in particular).
Book you've faked reading:
I'd only read half of Middlemarch when I had to write an essay on George Eliot for my tutor in my first term at Oxford. This wasn't wise, because I had one-to-one tutorials: we had to read our essays out loud and then go into intellectual combat with the tutor. To my relief, he liked the essay and complimented me for not retelling the story. I've felt shifty about it ever since.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Holes by Louis Sachar. It's perfectly formed and it makes me feel good.
Book you've bought for the cover:
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, when I was 16. It was a beautiful hardback with an elaborate jacket like medieval tapestry. The font inside was set in green or red, depending on whether Balthazar Bux was reading "The Neverending Story" or had become absorbed into the story within the narrative. I bought it for £2 from a tiny second-hand bookshop in my hometown. I still treasure it.
Book that changed your life:
The Yonderley Boy by Brian Morse. He was my class teacher around the time his first children's book was published. I was eight, and I loved that year: we did creative writing every day and he wrote juicy new words up on the blackboard for us to incorporate into our writing. The book itself was set in the Clent Hills very near where we lived, and it changed my life because it made me realize that writers were real people and that this might just be something I could aspire to do when I grew up.
Favorite line from a book:
Current favourite: "They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again." --A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, not because of the story itself, but because of the way it made me feel. I got it from the school library when I was eight, in a paperback with Pauline Baynes's delicate illustration on the front cover. The opening pages, when Lucy and Eustace get drawn into Narnia through the picture of a ship at sea, made me breathless. I was astonished. I felt as if I'd been pulled into the sea, too, and I hadn't known books could do that. I've read it a couple of times since but I get tripped up by the conservative commentary in the text and I know I can never be surprised by the story again.