One Day I Shall Astonish the World, brand new and perfect Stibbe. But it’s also true that you should swerve number five if you don’t want your heart broken with a hammer.

When I did, it was like turning up to a party and finding all your friends already there. I don’t know how I managed not to discover the Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard until last year. You should swerve the fifth volume of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles if you don’t want your heart broken with a hammer I was completely obliterated by Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, and thought I would keep returning to them, but never have, anxious I think that if it isn’t the same whole and perfect reading experience it was then, memory of it will be ruined. I have had a copy of Fox 8 by George Saunders within reaching distance in my writing shed since I first read it, in 2013, in a state of stunned, revelatory joy. There are favourites I go back to once a year, but I’ve never gone back to anything I took a passionate set against the first time because, as such a late starter, I read with a permanent sense of being behind and feel like there’s not enough time for second tries at things. (It feels like going to a stranger’s lovely house and spotting your own damp swimsuit in a heap in the corner of the living room, mortified and confused as to how something so intimate of yours has ended up there, is the answer.) It was bookshops more than any single writer wandering places like Daunt in Marylebone when I lived in London in my early 20s, imagining what it would be like to see your own book on a shelf. The book that made me want to be a writer Realising then that if that’s what I want as a reader – humour and pathos together – why would I go out of my way not to write that way. In the end, I couldn’t face the first one, and read Stibbe twice instead. But during that consequently unhappy time, I went on holiday and took one dark, difficult novel and Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe. When I set out to write fiction, I was desperate to be literary, and I thought that meant keeping everything very bleak and not letting any “jokes” get into things. When I came to Jane Austen’s Emma, I understood finally what everyone had been talking about – that there really is such a thing as reading for pleasure. But in my final year of school, I moved countries and was instantly friendless – I had nothing to do but read.

My resistance to reading lasted all the way through my teens I struggle to name a single book in that time.

Sorrow and bliss by meg mason