I’ve always relied on books. With a book you’re never alone. My mother would read me the Meg and Mog series, written by Helen Nicoll and illustrated by Jan Pienkowski. The series made me fall in love with books as a concept and made me want to become an author.
The Great Gatsby when I was around 12, which makes me sound like a precocious brat. It was for a sponsored read at my secondary school in Belfast. I discovered such clarity in F Scott Fitzgerald’s prose. When I wrote my fourth book, The Party, I aspired to write party scenes as brilliantly as he did. Obviously I failed because nobody could match him.
The first serious one, beyond unrequited crushes, happened when I
