The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book 

The Disappearers is based on a violent incident that was rumoured to have happened but was never proven, at least not up to the point when I began writing. But in Jamaica we trust rumours more than facts, so the fact that people kept whispering about it meant it was true. But I’m more concerned with an incident’s aftermath than the thing itself, and fiction is ideally placed to bring what might be a closed-off chapter right into the open.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

I was eight years old, and the novel was Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. It was the first novel where I experienced what John Gardner called the ‘vivid continuous dream’, and it happened by accident. Up until that point, I found the idea of a book without pictures ridiculous, as in: why would anyone subject themselves to such a ghastly thing. Along came my library copy of Little House, but someone had torn out all the pictures. I read it anyway. With no pictures to limit my imagination, it was as if my head exploded. I still feel that way when I read a good book.  

The book that made me want to become a writer  

See above. The first thing I thought was ‘how can I do that?’  

The book I read again and again  

Every year I read a Toni Morrison novel because I am always discovering something new with every re-read. This year’s re-read: Tar Baby. I also remember reading Lord of the Flies for the first time at 15, and thinking that this was more apocalyptic than Mad Max. I keep re-reading it hoping I will see it differently.  

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. Funnily enough, it was the way that it made me feel the same that was different. I remember finishing that novel thinking that this was most incisive book about Jamaica ever written, except it was set in the Philippines. I realised two things: that the world really is one country, and that in nearly every country you are caught between a general election and a beauty contest. 

The book that changed the way I think about the novel  

Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. Until then I had no idea that novel could be more than schoolwork. That A-level English literature could actually be fun.  

The book I’m reading right now  

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards. So, an old recluse living alone in the Channel Islands dies and leaves behind a completed novel about an old recluse living alone in the Channel Islands. But we rarely end up alone by choice (even if we did make a choice) and the novel brilliantly, funnily and heartbreakingly describes how he got there. With narration that sounds like English blurred into French and vice versa, there has never been anything like it.  

Where I most like to read  

Where I am right now, on the grass in a park in Brooklyn.  

Where and when I most like to write, and the tools I need  

I need to write as fast as I think, so that means typing on a laptop. All I need is a desk of my own and Alice Coltrane to set the scene and prepare the room.  

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon. ‘Do not shoot. I’m a B-b-british object,’ remains one of the most striking sentences I’ve ever encountered in a book. I never got over that Gemmy Fairey, cast ashore in Australia, raised by Aboriginals until 16, referred to himself not as subject, but as a thing.