Francis Spufford

I still can't do anything like that.

But you work out how to kind of swallow and digest your influences.

And with any luck, you work out how to do something that's a bit like you.

Oh, what else goes into it?

Absolutely, Marilynne Robinson.

Also, Penelope Fitzgerald, who is cheering in a different way because she didn't start writing fiction until she was about 60, and I started in my early 50s, so I'm ahead of the game.

Penelope Fitzgerald, who demonstrated that you could do this kind of sly act

oblique, perfectly balanced thing.

Often novels that made these beautifully concise visits to different bits of history.

So The Beginning of Spring is set in Moscow in 1910, and The Blue Flower, her masterpiece, is set in 18th century Germany, and Innocence is set in 1950s Italy.

She likes travelling, but

But what she got when she went to all these places, as well as giving a kind of master class in how to realize different bits of the past kind of likely, was this kind of scrupulous balance between a very tough-minded sense of how wrong and clumsy and messy human lives were likely to be and

and also a sense that that didn't banish the possibility of grace.

So she really comes in for me as well as a kind of signpost in what I was trying to do with Light Perpetual.

Other people, slightly 90 degrees from that, in terms of thinking, I wish I could do that with sentences, Michael Chabon, the American author of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, which still stands for me as, it's not the most perfect book I've ever read, but it is,

probably the most perfectly pleasurable book I've ever read.

It is a bizarre, completely self-pleasing crime novel set in a version of history that didn't happen in which rather than the state of Israel being founded, the survivors of the Holocaust got evacuated to Alaska.

So they're living in Alaska speaking Yiddish.

It's a really nicely done kind of noir crime novel with more Yiddish phrases than you could shake a stick at in it.

But it is also, it is just built from the most exquisitely pleasurable sentences.