Cassie McCullough

I read Anne of Green Gables.

I read A Little Princess.

And I think what I loved about those stories were that they were they always began with a change.

You know, there was someone taken from society.

a normal, happy situation or at least sort of a neutral situation.

And then their lives kind of just changing.

And I had such a stable childhood that maybe I sort of craved some sort of spark, some sort of inciting incident to kind of bring my world to life in a way.

And I think that, you know, both my books, The Doll Factory and Circus of Wonders, they both begin with that change, whether that's Iris leaving the doll making shop to become an artist or

Or Nell, her life changing when she is sold to the circus and that being this moment of her world expanding, even though at the beginning it's something she's terrified of.

Oh, I mean, most of the year it feels like has been lockdown.

Bookshops have only just opened again.

Last, it's strange, because last year, I think I kind of coped with lockdown by just absolutely immersing myself in a slightly obsessive way in fiction.

And I read something like 200 books, which, you know, every single evening, I'd read a different novel.

And it was a way of kind of escaping this very

small and stagnant and worrying world that I was in, you know, that I could escape to absolutely anywhere, you know, any time, any place, any century.

And so I found a real solace in those novels, which took me to completely different places.

But since then, actually, in the new year, my reading has almost completely stopped.

And I don't know if that's because the world started to open up again, or if maybe I just completely exhausted myself with

All of these different voices and narratives and, you know, my brain was like, ah, stop, you've got to live your own life now.

They were all new books, all of them, in a way which, as I mentioned, was sort of almost obsessive.