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As a child, I spent a lot of time at the library.

When I was young, my parents had a library in our living room. I was always free to browse and read.

When I was 14, I saw a library for the first time.

Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.

As a kid, I would get my parents to drop me off at my local library on their way to work during the summer holidays, and I would walk home at night. For several years, I read the children's library until I finished the children's library. Then I moved into the adult library and slowly worked my way through them.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

I didn't even enter a bookshop until I was 14 because I couldn't afford books until I got my first Saturday job, but by the time I was six or seven, I spent practically every Saturday down my local library reading as much as I could and getting out as many books as I could.

My mother brought us to the library every week, and I read a lot. That's what kept me company. I went from school to school, but there was always reading.

I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.