Belinda Castles

And Beat Not the Bones is set in Papua.

And it's a very, very, it's a psychological thriller.

And it's very dense and very atmospheric.

And just a wonderful book.

And for me, discovering this Australian author from that period was absolutely revelatory.

I always look at how animals are represented in fiction.

I can go right back to Middlemarch and start looking at the dogs in Middlemarch.

And because very often, particularly in that period,

Authors would use the animals as a way to play off the character of the human protagonist.

So a flighty young woman will have a yappy little spaniel.

The dodgy guy will try and give a little white fluffy thing to the girl that he likes.

But she'll have a noble spaniel or Labrador-type dog, you know, that shows that she's on the straight and narrow and has her head screwed on right.

So I'm definitely always on the lookout for animals and what they're doing in the background or in the foreground of books.

I think the one that always tends to stand out would have to be, you know, Sherlock Holmes' The Mystery of Silver Blaze and the dog that barked in, or the dog that didn't bark in the night time rather.

So that's always the fictitious dog that sits there.

Jack London to a certain degree with, you can't sort of get away from those, those really early dog things.

I'm not an old, yellow, tragic dog ending kind of person.

I like to see the dogs living happily ever after.

But there are always lots of lovely animals there.

I'm going to go off a little bit off piste here and say C.J.