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The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

'Pale Fire' by Vladimir Nabokov was bloody hard work but really thrilling.

Charles Blow's memoir 'Fire Shut Up in My Bones' was a breathtaking piece of writing.

We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.

Before I left the 'Star' last year to write books full-time, I welcomed catastrophe. It was material. Missed planes, broken pipes, dead lawns, digestive disorders, you name it, if it was something that had gone horribly wrong, it was worth banging out 600 words about.

The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.

We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.

You have started the book with this bubble over your head that contains a cathedral full of fire - that contains a novel so vast and great and penetrating and bright and dark that it will put all other novels ever written to shame. And then, as you get towards the end, you begin to realise, no, it's just this book.