WHAT BOOK?

…are you reading now?

FREE Therapy by debut short story writer Rebecca Ivory, which I rushed to the shops to pick up. The captivating Alice Munro and her collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Japanese Ghost Stories by the Irish-Greek fantasy writer Lafcadio Hearn, a Penguin book of modern women’s short stories published in 1990 featuring an array of now forgotten women writers … Oh and Hilary Mantel’s A Memoir of my Former Self and Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special…

would you take to a desert island?

THAT would need to be the Norton Anthology of Poetry, which has been sitting neglected on my bookshelf since college days. The particular anthology may be out of fashion, but I reckon, you can’t read a poem too many times

…first gave you the reading bug?

LIKE many girls my gateway into literature was the Baby-Sitters Club series by Ann M Martin, about a group of go-getting girls and their babysitting charges in a town called Stoneybrook which formed about three quarters of my childhood imagination. From age 12-16 I read nothing at all. At 16, it was Anne Enright then straight to Tolstoy.…

left you cold?

THIS almost never happens. I am a completionist and will persevere with even the most heart-sinking of prospects once I have begun the first chapter. It is a psychic pact you make between reader and writer from the moment you embark, to finish their book.

As a result, a troubling quantity of half-read books tend to collect around my night-stand, living space and work space. I don’t recommend this. But forced to choose one: I have always been disappointed by my failure to enjoy the great romantic classic Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. It’s just so shrill.

O Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong is out now published by Tramp Press