My first exposure to The Woman in Black was GCSE Drama many years ago. We studied it in class and then saw the West End version, which, by the way, was not only a feat of both technical design and acting, but was also bloody terrifying.

I’ve read this incredible novel at least five times since last February. The mastery involved in this tale unfolding – if I produced a book like The Secret History, I’d only be putting out one novel a decade too.

The Master and Margarita had been on my radar for a long time as someone who loves stories about witches and the Devil.

Marathon Man perfectly captures the 1970s Jewish experience as my father described it: a generation away from the Holocaust, but Nazis were still being brought to justice. In other words, the trauma was generational and very much had not been forgotten.

There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.

Brighton Rock is intense to say the least. It may be a classic race against time thriller, but it’s also a strange, heady mix of poverty-sticken provincialism and the potential damnation of one’s eternal soul.

Why is Rebecca one of my favourite books? Well, the big twist holds up every time I read it, the protagonist’s anxieties become mine, and the atmosphere at Manderley is a heady mix of claustrophobia and lushness.