Learning to Speak American by Colette Dartford #BlogTour #MyLifeInBooks

Having suffered in silence since the tragic death of their young daughter, Lola and Duncan Drummond's last chance to rediscover their love for one another lies in an anniversary holiday to the gorgeous Napa Valley.

Unable to talk about what happened, Duncan reaches out to his wife the only way he knows how - he buys her a derelict house, the restoration of which might just restore their relationship.

As Lola works on the house she begins to realise the liberating powers of letting go. But just as she begins to open up, Duncan's life begins to fall apart.

After all the heartbreak, can Lola and Duncan learn to love again? 

Welcome to the Blog Tour for Learning to Speak American by Colette Dartford, published on 14 July 2016 by Twenty7 Books, with my review and a special My Life In Books piece put together by the author.


Learning to Speak American is Colette Dartford's debut novel, it is a tender and powerful novel that deals with some heartrending issues.

Lola and Duncan Drummond have had a charmed life, wealthy and successful with the trappings that go with it. Their seemingly perfect life came crashing down around them three years ago, when their cherished and much loved eight-year-old daughter was killed.

The Drummonds have dealt with their painful loss in their own personal ways, but have never discussed what happened on that awful day. In fact, they don't mention Clarissa's name at all. Duncan makes one last ditch attempt to try to heal Lola and books a surprise trip to the Napa Valley in California. Whilst there, they find themselves outside The Treehouse, an almost derelict house that Lola falls instantly in love with. When Duncan buys it for her, he hopes against hope that by restoring the Treehouse, they can restore their love, and their relationship.

I was totally swept away by this story, and the abundance of well-rounded, expertly crafted characters. It's an easy read, but surprises the reader by dealing with some emotional and sensitive issues, compassionately and with care.

I loved Lola, her pain is raw and so well described, she's frail and vulnerable, yet has an inner strength and force that is exposed many times. Poor Duncan .... I didn't like him, despite the horror that he too has had to endure, I found his way of coping with his pain so very sad - for himself and for those around him.

The contrasting landscapes of the Californian Napa Valley and their home in Somerset are written with convincing detail, and the contrast in lifestyles and character is engaging.

Learning to Speak American is a study of a breaking relationship, concentrating on how deep-rooted fears and secrets can alter a life for ever. Colette Dartford is a talented author, I look forward to reading more from her.

My thanks to the publisher for my review copy, and for inviting me to take part in the Blog Tour.

I'm delighted to welcome Colette Dartford to Random Things today. 

She's sharing with us a list of the books that are special to her and have made a lasting impression on her life. 

My Life in Books ~ Colette Dartford

The Ship That Flew by Hilda Lewis  I have a vivid memory of going to the local library with my brother when I was seven years old. We were allowed to choose one book each, and I chose The Ship That Flew by Hilda Lewis. I can still remember the wonder of reading about Peter and his incredible adventures in the magic ship. The story inspired a lifelong love of reading and made me realise that a book can captivate the imagination in a way nothing else can.

An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan  This is a painfully haunting account of Keenan's four-and-a-half years as a prisoner of Shi'ite militiamen in Beirut. Much of this time he had no contact with anyone other than his jailers, but then he was joined by another hostage, the journalist John McCarthy. Keenan and McCarthy formed a deep and enduring friendship that sustained them during the brutal horrors of their ordeal. An extraordinary book that I will never forget.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt  Donna Tartt's debut novel richly deserves its status as a modern classic. Tartt's most accomplished work, in my opinion, The Secret History is about a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college, who overstep the bounds of morality. I'm re-reading it at the moment, simply to bask in Tartt's masterful use of language.

Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott  Another book I dip in and out of from time to time. Its full title is 'Some Instructions on Writing and Life', as it serves as both a writer's manual and a collection of insights into life in general. Lamott's views are derived from her strong Christian beliefs, but it's a light, humorous and comforting read, that always makes me smile. The chapter on Publication is particularly prescient for me right now. Writers often perceive publication as the holy grail, a myth roundly dispelled by Lamott. And she's right - it is the beginning of a whole new set of anxieties and insecurities - but that doesn't detract from the sense of achievement it brings.

Solar by Ian McEwan  As far as I'm concerned, Ian McEwan can do no wrong, so it was difficult to select one book among his many masterpieces. I chose Solar because it's his only foray into comic fiction, and he does it brilliantly. It's a darkly satirical and wickedly funny account of a brilliant man's conceit in both his personal and professional life. I would advise against reading it on public transport though, unless you want to be seen crying tears of laughter. You have been warned.

The Condition by Jennifer Haigh  A wonderfully written novel that closely examines the complex relationships of the wealthy Massachusetts McKotch family; philandering scientist father, prim, blue-blooded mother, one successful son, one unsuccessful son and a daughter with Turner's syndrome. Again, it's the quality of the writing that makes this book stand out for me, A very satisfying read.

Do No Harm by Henry Marsh  The subtitle is Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery - not an obvious choice but a thought provoking, accomplished and superbly written book. The author, a neurosurgeon, offers a unique account of the fragility not just of the brain, but of life itself. Countless times I had to put this book down simply to absorb the significance of what I had just read. It is a truly astonishing achievement that has rightly been showered with accolades and awards.

Colette Dartford ~ July 2016

A Londoner by birth, Colette Dartford went to university in Bath and made it her home. A scholarship to undertake a doctorate led to a career in health and social research, before she moved to California's Napa Valley.  Here she studied Viticulture and Enology and wrote her debut novel.

Find out more about the author at www.colettedartford.com

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The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown #BlogTour

Chicago 1999

Madeleine is trapped - by her family's expectations, by her controlling husband - in an unhappy marriage and a life she never wanted.  But when she finds a diary detailing her grandmother Margie's trip to Jazz Age Paris, she meets a woman she never knew: a dreamer who defied her strict family and spent a summer living on her own, and falling fro a charismatic artist.

When Madeleine's marriage is threatened, she escapes to her hometown to stay with her disapproving mother. Shaken by the revelation of a family secret and inspired by her grandmother's bravery, Madeleine creates her own summer of joy. In reconnecting with her love of painting and cultivating a new circle of friends, the chance of a new life emerges - but will she be bold enough to take it? 

Welcome to my spot on the Blog Tour for The Light of Paris by Eleanor Brown which was published in trade paperback by Borough Press on 14 July 2016 and is the author's second novel. Her first book, The Weird Sisters, was published in 2011.


One of the best ways for any author or publisher to tempt me with a book is to mention that it's a dual-time narrative and that one of the eras is the 1920s (or the 1960s, I adore them both!). When I read the blurb about The Light of Paris and saw mention of 1920s Jazz Age Paris, I knew that this was a story for me.

The Light of Paris is an absolute joy to read. Eleanor Brown's two lead characters, Madeleine and Margie are separated by seventy years, yet they have so many things in common. Madeleine's life is coming unstuck and she's found herself staying with her mother in her old bedroom, in her childhood home, surrounded by people who've known her for a lifetime.

When Madeleine discovers her grandmother Margie's diary, she is transfixed and discovers things about her, and her family that she had no idea about.

Margie's story seems to spur Madeleine along, and it's not long before she is a permanent resident of the small Southern town, leaving her controlling husband far behind. She then discovers more of Margie's life ... and secrets.

The compare and contrast between these two women is done incredibly well, and it is clear that in parts of society, attitudes towards those women who don't quite fit the mould. are just as strong now as they were in the 1920s.

Whilst I enjoyed the 1990s setting and the at times, hateful people who inhabit Madeleine's home town, I was absolutely smitten by Margie's time in Jazz Age Paris. She lived alone, she danced, she loved, she discovered things that she'd never imagined and certainly would never have seen if she hadn't travelled to Europe. Her time there was short, but Eleanor Brown vividly and brilliantly brought the city to life and the reader experiences Margie's joy alongside her.

This is an easy-to-read and thoughtful story that I enjoyed very much. The author deals with the hugest of choices and how those can affect the generations that come afterwards. Delicate and gentle with big-hearted characters with an incredible sense of place, this is a beautiful summer read.

My thanks to the Borough Press who sent my copy for review and invited me to take part in this Blog Tour.

Eleanor Brown is the New York Times and number one international best selling author of The Weird Sisters, hailed by People Magazine as a 'delightful debut' and 'creative and original' by Library Journal.

Her second novel, The Light of Paris was published in the summer of 2016.

Eleanor teaches writing workshops at The Writer's Table in Highland's Ranch at at Lighthouse Writer's Workshop in Denver as well as writing conferences and centres nationwide.

An avid CrossFit participant, Eleanor is the author of WOD Motivation and a contributor to CrossFit Journal.

Born and raised in the Washington, DC area, Eleanor lives in Colorado, with her partner, writer JC Hutchins. 

Find out more at www.eleanor-brown.com
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Sandlands by Rosy Thornton #BlogTour #MyLifeInBooks

Folks who aren't from hereabouts always make out that Suffolk's flat. Buy my Suffolk's not flat at all.

From the white dove appearing through the dark wood to the blue-winged butterflies rising in a cloud as a poignant symbol of happier times, the creatures of the Suffolk landscape move through Rosy Thornton's delicate and magical collection of stories.

The enigmatic Mr Napish is feeding a fox rescued from the floods; an owl has been guarding a cache of long-lost letters; a nightingale's song echoes the sound of a loved voice; in a Martello tower on a deserted shore Dr Whybrow listens to ghostly whispers. Through the landscape and its creatures, the past is linked to the present, and generations of lives are intertwined. 

Sandlands by Rosy Thornton is published by Sandstone Press on 21 July 2016, available in paperback and eBook.


I was delighted to hear that Rosy Thornton was to publish a collection of short stories, I've always enjoyed her writing and it seems such a long time since her last book was published. I've read and reviewed a couple of her novels here on Random Things; The Tapestry of Love (April 2011) and Ninepins (April 2012).

Sandlands is a collection of sixteen short stories, all linked to the village of Blaxhall on the Suffolk coast. Whilst geographically, Suffolk and my home county of  Lincolnshire are miles apart, I get the feeling when I read these stories that they are very similar places, with the coastal towns and villages, the flat fenland, the rolling hills, the wonderful wildlife and the abundance of legends and ghost stories.

Blaxhall, and indeed Suffolk are brought to life by the author, her knowledge of the landscape and the people is obvious and her details are wonderfully vivid. Ancient history with scents of magic and ghostly goings-on are woven into each story and I have a special fondness for All The Flowers Gone which is set on a disused RAF base and although it is just fourteen pages in length it captures the unique essence and eeriness of the setting. I spent four years working on three ex RAF base villages in the Lincolnshire Wolds and the author has perfectly captured the sense of place whilst incorporating a poignant story of three generations of women.

Sandlands is an apt title for this elegant collection of stories. Just as the sand slips around and is fragile and delicate, these stories slip from era to era and place to place.

Beautiful, gentle, mystical; Sandlands is a collection of stories that capture the heart.


My thanks to the author and the publisher who sent my copy for review and invited me to take part in the Sandlands Blog Tour.

I'm delighted to welcome Rosy Thornton to Random Things today. She's sharing the books that have made an impression on her life  (and a song!).  Here's her My Life In Books:

My Life In Books ~ Rosy Thornton

I discovered very early the indulgent pleasure to be had in crying over a good book. In primary school days, this mainly meant sad things happening to animals. I read and re-read Grey Owl's Sajo and her Beaver People, and the pages of my copy of Anna Sewell's Black Beauty were crinkly with dried tears - especially the chapter entitled 'Poor Ginger'. These books also fed a youthful tendency towards campaigning zeal, although there wasn't much call for marching with banners in 1970s Suffolk about the shooting of beaver for the fur trade or use of the bearing rein with carriage horses (We had a Hillman Imp.)

I know this isn't Desert Island Discs, but am I allowed a song? Because my urge to find causes to fight for found more concrete form in my late teens. In fact, I can pinpoint it to the day, and a time - on 2nd May 1982, watching rescue helicopters winch Argentinian sailors from a churning South Atlantic Ocean following the sinking of the General Belgrano, and realising that this was not the aftermath of some storm or accident but the deliberate act of my own government. The soundtrack to that turning-point for me is the UB40 song Burden of Shame. My reading around that time was earnestly political, and it fell along a sort of red-green axis, with the twin beacons being E F Schumacher's Small is Beautiful and Nye Bevan's In Place of Fear.

It was perhaps a similar sympathy for the plight of the downtrodden Victorian farm labourer and factory hand which led me in my early twenties to the great 19th century social reformist novelists. I dabbled with Hardy, couldn't get on with Dickens, but gradually fell in love with two women who remain my favourite authors - George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell.

Years later, at the age of 41, it was Gaskell's North and South which first set me on the road to writing fiction of my own. In 2004, the BBC screened Sandy Welch's adaptation of the book with the gorgeous Richard Armitage smouldering dangerously in the lead role of John Thornton, and going some way towards banishing my ten-year obsession with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy. I went online to discuss the series and the book and discovered a hidden world of North and South fanfiction. I took a stab at it myself and posted an initial chapter - and three months later found to my surprise that I'd completed a full-length pastiche sequel to Mrs Gaskell's novel! It was utter tosh, of course, but by then I was hooked. I had to keep on writing.

Having gone to Cambridge as an undergraduate to study Law, I found I didn't want to leave, staying for a PhD and then a lectureship. My impulse to change the world took a different channel through a developing academic interest in women and the law, in which I still run a seminar course at Cambridge. One book which has inspired me in this enterprise, along with generations of my students, is barrister Helena Kennedy's Eve Was Framed: Women and British Justice - both a personal memoir and a political polemic.

Although I've spent my working life in Cambridge, Suffolk is where I grew up and has always felt like home. I maintained my links through family and friends, as well as by the annual every-hopeful renewal of my season ticket at Ipswich Town FC. The Suffolk landscape - which, contrary to popular belief is

not flat but diverse, beautiful and endlessly surprising - has always felt part of my soul, and a long-time companion of mine has been Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, George Ewart Evans' classic picture of the ways of rural life in a Suffolk village, told through pen portraits of the residents, their memories, stories, sayings, and superstitions. Coincidentally, when five years ago I took a step closer to my roots, shifting my life back to Suffolk at weekends and during university vacations, it was to the very village of Blaxhall in the coastal sandlings when Evans' book is set. The move proved an inspiration to me. The landscape, the wildlife, the people and the cultural heritage of the place all crept under my skin and the stories which form my collection, Sandlands, were born. Many of them came to being inside my head during long rambling walks with one or other of my two spaniels (both of them Suffolk born!) through the countryside around Blaxhall. From gently rolling farmland, through woods and lowland heath to estuarial salt marshes and shingle beaches, these are the places with form the heart of Sandlands.

My writing has been described as gentle, thoughtful, quiet in a way which is perhaps out of fashion in this era of the page-turner, or the compulsory, immediate delivery of thrills. This tendency may reflect my own fondness for women's period fiction of a less outspoken age, and espeically that of Barbara Pym. Jane and Prudence is a particular gem.

On the other hand, I've always harboured a weakness for a nice haunting. I love the ghost stories of MR James. A Martello Tower on the Suffolk coast looms dark and forbidding in A Warning to the Curious - and one of the stories in Sandlands (entitled, appropriately enough 'A Curiostiy of Warnings') is written in homage to James.

Finally, I couldn't complete this list without reference to two of the brilliant contemporary collections of short stories which I read and which inspired me when I was starting to turn my hand from novels to 'the short form' (as they say). Both are sets of linked and themed stories, just as Sandlands aspires to be, and both conjure the atmosphere of their landscape in a way I can only dream of emulating: the flat fenlands of Norfolk and Lincolnshire in Jon McGregor's This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You, and the Cornish coastline in Lucy Wood's Diving Belles.

Rosy Thornton ~ July 2016

Rosy Thornton is an author of contemporary fiction, published originally by Headline Review and more recently by Sandstone Press.

In her novels and short stories she enjoys exploring family relationships (especially mothers and daughters), and the way people relate to place and landscape.

In real life she lectures in Law at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Emmanuel College.

She shares her home with her partner and two lunatic spaniels!

For more information about Rosy Thornton and her writing, visit www.rosythornton.com

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My Life In Books ~ talking to author Jason Hewitt

My Life in Books is an occasional feature on Random Things Through My Letterbox

I've asked authors to share with us a list of the books that are important to them and have made a lasting impression on their life.

I'm delighted to welcome Jason Hewitt to Random Things today.  Jason is the author of two novels; The Dynamite Room which was published by Scribner in March 2014.  

His second novel, Devastation Road was published in hardback by Scribner in July last year, I reviewed it on Random Things in August.

Devastation Road is published in paperback today - July 14th 2016.  It's a wonderful story, I called it a "brilliant reading journey that will stay with me for a long time."

My Life In Books ~ Jason Hewitt

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende   I am not talking about the film here. The film is atrocious. However in 1984 as a small boy any film seen at the cinema, no matter how ropey, blew my mind and so I went out and bought the book. The story is less dense than The Lord of the Rings, less geeky than Douglas Adams, has hints of The Wizard of Oz, and the oddities of Alice In Wonderland, and with flourishes of Narnia thrown in for good measure. In fact it's got everything you want in a children's book - sprites, and ogres, and talking horses, and flying dragons, and riddles - and with its post-modernist plot I remember thinking it was the cleverest story I had ever read. (And still do,) What's more it's a book about books. So, what's not to like about that? I hold Michael Ende entirely responsible for me wanting to become an author.

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie  By my teenage years I had got into Agatha Christie. And I mean to the point of obsession. I even bought her biography and avidly read the background to each of her novels that I had read. The version I read of this particular classic had a different title (Ten Little Indians) which didn't give the twist away, so I still remember that gasp when I got to the end and thought: 'hang on, but they're all dead. So ... oh my God, who did it?' I was completely blown away. To be fair, the writing is clunky as hell and the characters are all abysmal stereotypes - but it's a masterclass on how to structure a story. Reading this was the first time I began to wonder about the actual mechanics of crafting a plot.

I'm the King of the Castle by Susan Hill  My A Level English teacher, Mrs Baldock, introduced me to two authors that I fell in love with - Iris Murdoch and Susan Hill. We read Susan Hill's short story collection, A Bit of Singing & Dancing, but it was I'm the King of the Castle that had a profound effect on me. Reading it there are still whole sections when I can feel my chest tightening. She writes so simply and yet is the ultimate Queen of Threat. No one creates atmosphere like Susan Hill, and the relationship she builds between Hooper and Kingshaw is so strained that it makes your ears want to pop. It also contains one of the most terrifying bird incidents ever committed to paper.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte I first read Wuthering Heights at university, and then incorporated it into a dissertation that I wrote on Victorian attitudes to mental illness and its portrayal in gothic fiction. I have always loved dark, brooding novels (My university years were also spent devouring Thomas Hardy), but few are as brutal and savage as this. It's intensely visceral and violent, and without any let-up. I love gothic fiction too, and whilst this skirts around the edges of it we have all the gothic elements that you might expect - damsels in distress, ghosts as windows, premonitions, hauntings, graveyardss and bleak but beautiful landscapes.

Perfume by Patrick Suskind  Set in 18th century France, it's about the life of a boy called Jean-Baptiste Grenouille who has an intense sense of smell but no smell himself. It's a fantastic fable and satire and the most rich and consistently inventive one that I think I have ever come across. It's also savagely funny, unashamedly depraved, and, as the title suggests, thick with scent. In fact the attention to details and descriptions are just incredible. Throw in Grenouille, an anti-hero second only to Tom Ripley, and the novel's tongue in cheek attack on humanity, and you've got one of the most imaginative pieces of literature ever written. I'm regularly prone to random bookshop purchases when a book on a table catches my attention but this is by far the best accidental purchase I have ever made.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy  Finally, this is the book that was the most influential to me in writing Devastation Road. It's set in the near future after an environmental catastrophe has left the planet dying so, to be fair, it's not big on laughs. It is, however, stunning in its simplicity, and, despite it's bleak storyline, is told with immense warmth and love. I don't mind admitting that the relationship between the father and son reduces me to tears every time I read it. The writing is a perfect reflection on the situation. Everything is stripped back and raw - punctuation, speech marks, names - reduced to the basics just as the characters are within their situation. If ever there was a lesson to a writer that less is more, this is it.

Jason Hewitt ~ July 2016

Jason Hewitt was born in Oxford and lives in London. He has a Bachelor of Arts degree in History and English and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University.

After completing his degree he spent a number of years working in a bookshop before eventually succumbing to the publishing industry and moving to London.

He is also a playwright and actor. His latest play, Claustrophobia, premiered at Edinburgh Fringe in August 2014, and was previewed at the St James Theatre, London.

As an actor he has performed major roles in a number of plays in London including Pericles, A Christmas Carol, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear.

Find out more information about Jason by visiting www.jason-hewitt.com

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I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh

A tragic accident. It all happened so quickly. She couldn't have prevented it. Could she?

In a split second, Jenna Gray's world descends into a nightmare. Her only hope of moving on is to walk away from everything she knows to start afresh. Desperate to escape, Jenna moves to a remote cottage on the Welsh coast, but she is haunted by her fears, her grief and her memories of a cruel November night that changed her life forever.

Slowly, Jenna begins to glimpse the potential for happiness in her future. But her past is about to catch up with her, and the consequences will be devastating. 

I Let You Go by Clare Mackintosh was published in paperback by Sphere in May 2015.


Yes, I know I'm very late to the party!  I Let You Go, the debut novel from Clare Mackintosh has been absolutely huge. Everyone has read it, everyone has been talking about it. I bought my copy months and months ago and finally, I've actually read it.

Whilst I'd heard all the chatter about this book, I've avoided the reviews, so I didn't have any idea what the story was about, but I had great expectations.

Sitting by the pool, during long, hot days in Corfu was the ideal place to read this one. It's one of those books that you just don't want to stop reading, flipping the pages frantically to see what's going to happen next .... when you are on holiday, you can do just that!

I Let You Go begins with the accident that shapes the whole story. The introductory chapters are quite sedate, but so absorbing. The reader is introduced to Jenna, and to the police team who are tasked with investigating the hit-and-run murder.

It's very difficult to talk about a plot that has so many twists and turns. There may be a few other people out there who haven't yet read I Let You Go, and I really don't want to spoil the story for you. Let's say that this is a very surprising story, with a couple of jaw-dropping moments that actually made me gasp out loud.

The author has very cleverly constructed this novel, with Jenna's voice in the first person and the police story told in the third person, this works extremely well.

A small child, killed in a hit and run accident is sensitive subject matter and the author has bravely tackled this, however, for me, it was the themes that emerge later in the book that I found really disturbing. The devastation and hurt that can happen within a relationship is chillingly described, this is a multi-layered and very clever exposure of a toxic relationship, and the horrifying ripple effects.

Clare Mackintosh's character creation is magnificent and her attention to detail is quite superb.

A gripping, surprising and quite shocking psychological thriller, like most people, I loved it!  The author's second novel, I See You, will be published on 28 July 2016, I can't wait to read it.



Clare Mackintosh spent twelve years in the police force, including time on CID, and as a public order commander. She left the police in 2011 to work as a freelance journalist and social media consultant and is the founder of the Chipping Norton Literary Festival. She now writes full time and lives in the Cotswolds with her husband and their three children.
Clare is the patron of the Silver Star Society, an Oxford-based charity which supports the work carried out in the John Radcliffe Hospital's Silver Star unit, providing special care for mothers with medical complications during pregnancy.

For more information about Clare and her writing, visit www.claremackintosh.com
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My Life in Books ~ talking to author Katie Marsh

My Life in Books is an occasional feature on Random Things Through My Letterbox

I've asked authors to share with us a list of the books that are important to them and have made a lasting impression on their life

Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Katie Marsh today.  Katie has written two novels, I have read and reviewed both of them here on Random Things.  I am a huge fan of her writing, she deals with devastating subjects with beautiful words and magical characters.

Her first novel, My Everything, was published by Hodder in August 2015. Her second, A Life Without You is published on Thursday (14th July 2016)

My Life In Books ~ Katie Marsh

I was brought up on a trout farm in a remote Somerset hamlet, and so mum sensibly taught me and my brother to read as early as possible to avoid our enthusiastic attempts to 'help' by feeding the fish Rice Krispies or trying to take the dog to London to meet the Queen.

From then on I was permanently glued to a book, bar small intervals spent trying to find the hamster and attempting to learn how to do a cartwheel.

Here are the ones that have stayed with me.

Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne  These are the building blocks of my childhood. I love these stories to such a degree that I can still recite huge chunks today, and am currently force-feeding Eeyore, Roo and friends to my daughter. Eeyore taught me all about sarcasm, Pooh about enthusiasm and those final moments in Galleon's Lap taught me about the poignancy of leaving childhood behind. Of course, I didn't realise that's what it was doing when I first read it - I just thought they were going home for tea. But now I know.

Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome  Listening to the Bernard Cribbins story tape of this ook was a key feature of my family's lengthy and overcrowded journeys to the Lake District in our battered Vauxhall Chevette. We went every summer and stayed on a farm that belonged to our cousins. I think I first read the actual book while adventuring up there, and soon I was eyeing up sailing boats on every lake we went to and busy pretending I was Nancy Blackett (always my favourite character) and drawing skull and crossbones on any available surface. We even named our dog after Nancy. Dad wanted to call her 'Bunker'. Oh dear.

I Capture The Castle by Dodie Smith  I still read this every December without fail - it's as much a part of Christmas for me as decorating the tree or overdosing on mince pies. I love Cassandra's voice  so honest, earnest and true. I adore the humour, the eccentricity and the innocence of the story, and the poignancy of the coming-of-age ending always makes me cry. And I love it when books make me cry.

Persuasion by Jane Austen  I had to have some Jane on this list. I ate up her books as I moved to a new school at the start of my teens and the wit, verve and spirit of her writing transported me through some fairly tricky times. Anne Elliot is my favourite Austen heroine - she feels the most real to me - perhaps all the more so because the rest of her selfish family are verging on the insanely caricatured. Anne is the beating heart of the book, and I love the slow and stilted way that love evolves again between her and Captain Wentworth, which culminates in THAT letter. I think Captain Woodward's scribbled words may be to blame for my tendency to extreme romanticism. Or maybe I should blame 'Dirty Dancing'. Who knows?

Rivals by Jilly Cooper  Jilly Cooper's books were passed around gleefully at school, and were - let's face it - a far more eye-opening and entertaining element of sex education than biology lessons. This one is my absolute favourite - great characters, big hair, telly, endless champagne and an awful lot of misbehaviour. Shy, unconfident Taggie conquers Rupert Campbell-Black. Damaged Cameron wins Patrick. Dogs loll around adorably and everyone reeks of perfume and makes puns. Brilliant.

Beloved by Toni Morrison  A friend lent this to me when I was ill, and I remember having to fake one extra day in bed to finish it. It tells the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who is driven to extreme violence against her own children when about to be recaptured. The writing is at times poetic and uplifting and at others vividly, horribly violent, but Morrison never stopped making me live every painful moment with the characters, and rooting for Sethe as her story unfolds. The writing is poetic, dreamlike and addictive, and the appearance of a new Toni Morrison book will always be a big event for me.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Other Plays by Tennessee Williams  I studied 'Cat' as one of my English A Level set texts, and somehow it survived this ordeal and is still one of my favourite plays today. I love the muscle and poetry of Williams' language as Brick and Maggie circle each other on a venomously hot night in the deep South. It's a play about hypocrisy and power and the destructive force of love and self-delusion, but it's also witty and charming and it was this combination that captured me and made me think about the kind of writer that I wanted to be. I can't think of a writr who portrays relationships in crisis with more depth, poignancy and honesty.

An Equal Music by Vikram Seth  I start fidgeting if there's no music on in a room, and this novel weaves that look into every single page. I made the mistake of starting it during university finals, and spent my time resenting the endless revision that prevented me from reading it. Uplifting, magnetic and spell-binding - it made my spirit sing.

Wonder by RJ Palacio  This is such a powerful gem of a book. I read it just after becoming a mum - in one of those sleepless nights where it's just you and your baby while the world rests in the darkness around you. It tells the story of a boy called Auggie, who says at the beginning 'I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.'  Whenever he enters a room he stands out in the most challenging of ways, and the book follows him as he starts middle school and has to cope with others' reactions to him as he leaves the bubble of his parents' protection. It is a story about not fitting in, being brave, and about how to trust the world to look after your children. As a new mum it really resonated with me. It is also a reminder of how important it is to be kind, and I think we all need to be reminded of that sometimes.  

Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton   Here it is: the book that made me stop and think about what kind of fiction I really wanted to write. I read it in one day, loving its visceral, page-turning storyline and its heart-rending ending. After putting it down I realised that the novel I was writing at the time wasn't the kind of novel I wanted to read, and so I put it away, regrouped and eventually had the idea for 'My Everything', my debut novel.

Katie Marsh ~ July 2016 

Find out more about Katie Marsh and her writing by visiting her website www.katie-marsh.com

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