The inspirations behind my Booker-shortlisted book  

I wanted to write about our human occupation of low earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. That amazingly evoked relationship between a boy and his dad helped me understand (in my own kid-way) something new about the love between parents and children, and my own love for my parents.  

 The book that made me want to become a writer  

This is difficult. I’m going to say Waterland by Graham Swift. I think it’s the strength and quality of Swift’s world-building, his gorgeous, layered storytelling flair and the sheer conviction of that novel that made me itch to write. It made me think, not, ‘I could do that’ but ‘I wonder if I could ever do that?’ 

I haven’t reread it, I don’t dare. But I’ve since read other books by Swift and my admiration’s undented. 

The book I return to time and time again  

Perhaps Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I’ve read it all the way through only twice, I think, but I dip into it often when I’m preparing things to talk about with my students, because its prose springs from the page as fresh and revelatory as it must have been 99 years ago when it was first published.  

I still marvel at the tracery of the language, its nimble, subtle weaving of multiple consciousnesses, and maybe with time and rereading I find her style more mannered but also more ingenious.  

The book I can’t get out of my head  

Last winter I read Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor (translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes), and I cannot get it out of my head. In many ways, I want to. It’s a brutal onslaught of a novel that brands you – I’ve no idea how Sophie Hughes pulled off this translation, but the result is remarkable. Everything about the book is masterful and undeniable. And yes, dazzling. Dark, dark, dark and dazzling.  

The book that changed the way I think about the world  

This is also difficult. Let’s say Miracles by C.S. Lewis. It’s about the centrality of the concept of miracle to Christianity but also makes a soulful argument for the presence of miracles in our daily lives. As a non-Christian, and someone with no formal faith, I love how his writing lends me, and the world I perceive, a quivering sense of the divine. His faith is seductive and electric.  

The book that changed the way I think about the novel  

Yes. It’s not a novel but it is fiction: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace. I read it, I put it down, and I thought, ‘I had no idea writing could do that’. That it could take me to those places.  

The book that impressed me the most  

I’d say either George Eliot’s Silas Marner or J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace or Marilynne Robinson’s Home or Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata. I can’t choose between, please don’t make me. I find them differently perfect, but they’re all simple tales told with utmost word-perfect elegance.  

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I’ve just finished The Friend by Sigrid Nunez (loved it, it made me sit next to my dog with my hand on her head and cry) and now I’m reading Pale Fire by Nabokov. I’m not far in and the type is so small and my middle-aged eyes so useless that I have to read it by the tiny, intense glow of my bike light. I think it’s going to be an adventure.  

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

Oh god! Impossible to answer that so I’m going to hedge my bets again: Restoration by Rose Tremain (breathtaking) and The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell (one of the best books of the last century?).