My earliest reading memory
My father taught literature and when I was young I liked to take the books down from the shelves in his study and look through the covers. Design in the 1970s leaned hard into surrealism – eyes on lighthouses and so on. The cover of A Clockwork Orange I remember finding particularly freaky. Also Saul Bellow’s name. How could someone be called Saul Bellow? I imagined him as a bear-like man with a huge beard and flaring nostrils. As to my own reading, I loved Mr Men and Olga da Polga, but the book that obsessed me was a big hardback of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The stories were significantly scarier than the Ladybird versions, and accompanied by beautiful, terrifying illustrations. I vividly remember a picture of the devil in a graveyard, leaping through the air, almost as frightening as the imaginary Saul Bellow.
My favourite book growing up
I remember my mum coming home one day with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It was the first of the Fighting Fantasy series, sword-and-sorcery quests in which the reader was the hero. You had to make decisions and turn to a different page accordingly. This seemed to me both a natural progression from conventional narrative and a mind-blowing rupture. I went on to read at least 30 of these books, which left me with a deep knowledge of different species of orc and an affection for writing in the second person.
