Una McCormack

I aspire to these.

It's incredible.

So I hooved it up.

Like you, I must have understood about one word in four, but something about the lilt of the sentences meant that I then went, I've read very little fiction as a teenager, but I consistently read Anita Bruckner.

And I think I must have read about the first 10

11 novels before I went off to university and stopped reading at all.

So that's when I first read it.

They were incredible.

They were a glimpse of a life I barely knew existed.

They're like that big box of chocolates that Alex and Nick are consuming, aren't they?

You read one, you read them very quickly.

I can answer that as the sort of ancient reader I am now as the teenager.

I genuinely do think it was a glimpse of a sort of sophistication, a metropolitan life that I didn't know.

But at the same time, you know, that bookish girl in Oakland.

It's responding to the story of lonely bookish girls everywhere, I think.

So I suspect that was it.

And then it had languages.

You're always going to be beguiled by those sentences, aren't they?

You always are.

So I think that must have been it.