My earliest reading memory
I was about five, sitting in my grandfather’s study in Brittany, listening to him reading to me in French from his translated copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. He read me those stories so often that when he tried to skip a section, or rephrase something he thought was clumsy, I would correct him word-for-word. His nickname for me was Grenouille (frog), which also happened to be what Mowgli, the young protagonist’s, name meant, and I was convinced the stories were about me.
My favourite book growing up
Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes. It had everything an imaginative, lonely child could want: a magical carousel; a carnival of monsters; the scent of autumn leaves in the sun; a glimpse of the darkness behind the nostalgia of childhood. And the language is as crisp and sweet as an October apple, awakening in me a passion for words and the magic they can evoke.
