I am not a computer person. I have nothing against them; we just don’t get along. It follows that I am not a natural or enthusiastic rider of the ebook bandwagon – it seems another technology I’ll fail to learn. What I am is a lifelong and committed reader. Fostered by the galloping loneliness of a post-divorce childhood and the gruelling grind of adolescence, I turned to reading early on as a means of escape.

I have been addicted ever since.

Fiction gets into you like that. The only child of an academic and an artist, this propensity to bookishness was perhaps inevitable, and I would want no other inheritance. Like my childhood heroines, Jo March and Anne Shirley, I write fiction too, now that I am grown up. I lecture on books in universities, and I review them. I still treat habitual, daily reading as a lifeline to be stringently gripped, should the real world get too grim. I struggle to write this without sounding hysterical – but to me, reading really is life, the universe. Everything.