Sarah Moss

But it's extremely funny, again, about writing and family life and marriage.

Yes, yes, and I love that.

It's always very subtle until it isn't.

Yes, I like writing children.

Well, I suppose we'll go back to Henry James and what made him new, but there's a long tradition of the strange child.

Jane Eyre is one of my lodestone books.

I read it the first time when I was far too young, and I just read it as a school story with a really boring romance text on the end.

And then as I've gone back to it through adult life, I've encountered a different book each time.

But that has, I mean, Jane herself, but then also Adele, and of course, Jane's friend Helen at Lowood are all slightly preternatural children.

I think I am often interested in places that haven't been much written about.

But one of my favourite books is Sarah Orne Jewett's Country's Appointed First.

She's 19th century American.

And that has a very intimate sense of place.

It's a small village in Maine and I've never, well, I think I've been through Maine on a train, but I don't know Maine at all and I don't know that landscape.

It's entirely foreign to me.

But she writes about it very beautifully and not in any way pretentiously.

I mean, it's not a book of romanticism, but there's a real love of landscape there and a deep investment in the community of the place, which I like and learn from.

Yes, we had an interestingly practical exploration of this because I've moved house quite a lot.

And each time I go through and read the bookshelves and it got to a point where every time I walked past the bookshelf, I was taking off a few to go to charity or to sell.

And I said to my husband, do you think if we went home indefinitely preparing to move and not moving, I'd end up with no books?