My earliest reading memory
Around four, sitting cross-legged on a swirly carpet in the lovely old library up the road from my childhood home, turning the pages of Ant and Bee and reading by myself for the first time. Also thinking it’s funny because my dad’s name is Anthony and his best friend is called John Bee and everyone calls them Ant and Bee.
My favourite book growing up
The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton. I should probably pretend it was something more original, but this book really did take my tiny, fresh little child’s brain, spin it around and take it to places that felt as though they were exactly the places I wanted it to go. Every layer of the tree was more thrilling than the last; I was enthralled.
The book that changed me as a teenager
I stopped reading when I was 13. I read 40 Agatha Christie novels in a year then didn’t pick up a book for fun again until I was in my early 20s. Music was my entire existence as a teen, and the only literature I read was the music press. When I returned to reading it was a full rebirth, and I read everything I could get my hands on.
The book that made me want to be a writer
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, which I read on holiday when I was in my mid-20s and which spoke to me in a voice that was so immediate and familiar that I found myself thinking I’d like to speak back to it.
The book or author I came back to
I was a much more voracious and wide-ranging reader as a youngster than I am now. I read Dickens at 11, sci-fi, feminist dystopia and political memoirs in my early 20s and romcoms and true crime in my late 20s. I have become much narrower in my tastes, reading mainly in my own genre.
The book I reread
I don’t reread. I have more than 200 books on my reading mountain and desperately want to read them all, and the only way I will ever do that is by moving forwards without looking back. The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by Gerald Basil Edwards, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, The Collector by John Fowles and Wally Lamb’s She’s Come Undone are all books that absorbed and consumed me on first reading and which I’m sure would have more to give if I were to read them again, but sadly I know I never will.
The book I could never read again
I’m not sure I’d want to read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho again. The shock of the book is the thing. The immediate jump into the filth and darkness. The 80s-ness of it, too, the double-breasted suits, slicked hair and marble floors. It was a moment that packed a punch but not one to revisit.
The book I discovered later in life
I read Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley only a few years ago, which subliminally inspired the character Henry Lamb from my novels.
The book I am currently reading
Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward.
My comfort read
The American writer Katherine Heiny. Her tone is conversational, often dark, always funny and perceptive. Opening one of her books is like opening the door to a coffee shop where you’re going to meet your favourite, clever friend. Standard Deviation is my pick of her novels.
• None of This Is True by Lisa Jewell is published by Century. She will be at the Capital Crime festival in London on 1 September.
