I was fourteen and the world was going to end. Four minutes, that was all we’d have, and then we’d be atomised: nothing between us and the bomb except a stupid understairs cupboard or a stupid kitchen table. Every time the Soviet Union and the States went head to head over Afghanistan, say, or Nicaragua, it meant High Wycombe was one step closer to being wiped off the map. Wycombe – I went to school there, I lived three miles away – was Strike Command, and we all knew it would go first. My friend Morna’s dad was in the RAF. At hers for a sleepover one night, I asked him (trying to make it sound casual) whether he thought there would be a nuclear war. Afterwards, Morna said: ‘There you go – a distant possibility’. But he’d said ‘a distinct possibility’, and after she went to sleep I lay awake, thinking and thinking about whether I might have heard wrong, and how much he really knew.

I went on a CND march. I read harrowing books set in post-apocalyptic landscapes, I looked at terrible pictures of what a nuclear bomb could do. I fantasised about the sorts of disaster which wouldn’t wipe out whole cities: illness, IRA bombs, car crashes. I set targets: could I survive long enough to go to University? Could I survive long enough to fall in love? For several months I was gripped by the sort of anxiety which today would receive a diagnosis. But I didn’t have clinical help. Instead, I had Douglas Adams.

My mate Melanie didn’t have a telly; her family listened to a lot of Radio 4. She told me about The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, and soon we were both listening to it. Then we read the book and adopted its language as our own (things were ‘hoopy’, people were ‘froods’. I see now how astonishingly annoying this must have been.) Arthur Dent is saved just moments before the earth is destroyed – the first in a series of close shaves, his reliable pessimism (‘So this is it: we’re going to die’) trumped reliably, as he continues to survive against the odds.

I read that book so many times, I think I must have internalised the dynamic: certain death succeeded by survival. At fourteen I was Arthur Dent, sucked out of a Vogon airlock and moments from annihilation. So this is it, I told myself, every time there was a hot piece of cold war rhetoric, every time the bomb was about to drop: this is it, we’re going to die. And then the Infinite Improbability Drive would engage, and – like Arthur – I would live. After a while, the anxiety released its grip on me, and I was free to get on with ordinary teenage obsessions. I grew up and the bomb didn’t drop, I went to University, I fell in love.

Improbability sum now complete.

This is what happens when your ability to read is outstripped by a compulsion to acquire. I sometimes fantasise about redressing the balance, taking a few months off writing to just read and drink tea. There may come a point where I will justify this to myself as essential to my work, and get on and do it. In the meantime I usually read before bed, and at any other moments I can crowbar out of my day. It doesn’t amount to much – certainly not enough to make a serious dent in the TBR. So it’s especially silly, perhaps, that I sent out a general appeal on Twitter this week for people to recommend recently-published* books they had loved. I just hate the idea that I might miss something brilliant.

I can now say with confidence that this is unlikely to happen. I am comforting myself with the knowledge that, rather like chips taken from someone else’s plate, money spent on books doesn’t count.

CHiPS (I thank you)

Here’s what people recommended. I’ve linked them all to places where you can buy them**, just in case you want to steal chips too. I’m going to start with a few books which several people absolutely adored:

Lucy Wood’s short story collection Diving Belles was raved about by several tweeters. Carmen Haselup praised its ‘incredible writing.’ Jane Smith called the voice ‘brilliantly distinctive…When people ask me what “voice” means I’m going to point them to Diving Belles.’ ’Nuff said.

Lots of readers loved Harriet Lane’s Alys Always, an utterly gripping novel which I read in a day because I just could not bear to put it down. My own two favourite books of 2011 - Jane Harris’s Gillespie and I and Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers - attracted plenty of rave reviews, as did this year’s The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

All the following came with their own passionate advocates; I am reinforcing the bookshelves this weekend:

Adult Fiction

Hurry Up and Wait – Isabel Ashdown

The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes

Tell the Wolves I’m Home – Carol Rifka Brunt

Heart-Shaped Bruise – Tanya Byrne

Canada – Richard Ford

The Memory of Love – Aminatta Forna

The White Lie – Andrea Gillies

The Raw Shark Texts – Steven Hall

Florence and Giles – John Harding

The Hollow Man – Oliver Harris

The Snow Child – Eowyn Ivey

The Blue Book – A. L. Kennedy

Please Look After Mother – Kyung-sook Shin

The Land of Decoration – Grace Mcclean

This Isn’t The Sort of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You – Jon McGregor

The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

Night Waking – Sarah Moss

State of Wonder – Ann Patchett

The Breaking of Eggs – Jim Powell

Hawthorn and Child - Keith Ridgway

The Adult – Joe Stretch

The Beginner’s Goodbye – Anne Tyler

Young Adult Fiction

15 Days Without A Head – Dave Cousins

The Brides of Rollrock Island – Margo Lanagan

Non-Fiction

Life After Death – Damien Echols

Poetry

Excisions – Clare Best

*I haven’t been unduly picky about this; it was a very rough rule of thumb. There are one or two I haven’t listed here, just because they’re more than a couple of years post-publication.

**Wherever possible I’ve linked to the Hive Network, which will involve your local independent bookshop in your online order. If you don’t like this other internet shops are, of course, available.

Last weekend, I spent a pleasurable few hours rearranging my fiction and poetry books from their previous system (alphabetical by author’s last name). They are now arranged by colour, like this:

I think this is very beautiful, so much so that it affords further opportunities for work avoidance, viz. that I sometimes stop work just so I can look at it. It does occur to me that this may seem like the product of a disturbed mind (I have, for example, spent quite some time fiddling with the reds so that they segue from scarlet into crimson. In the following picture the process was not quite complete):

The truth is that I am really quite anal and will always need to use some structuring principle to organise my books. Grouping by colour is, in fact, pretty free-wheeling by my standards, a step away from the strictures of alphabetising, towards serendipity and chance.

This is a posh way of saying I’ll never find anything again.

Here are some blues and violets:

Lovely, aren’t they? There’s a great survey in the latest MsLexia about book fetishists. The magazine asked 2,300 women writers to answer questions about their relationship with books. Some of the respondents make me look positively laid-back. ‘When publishers redesign their logos,’ one woman says. ‘I have to rearrange books and authors to keep the different logos apart.’ I particularly like the ‘have to’ in there. I wonder if she knew she’d done that?

Here are some beiges, which I’ve found more aesthetically pleasing than I expected.

These pictures also illustrate what book lovers already know: that you can glean a huge amount of information about someone from their library. It is nakedly obvious here, for example, that whilst I’ve read Middlesex twice (the curved and softened spine, the scuffed edges) my copy of Middlemarch (T.V. tie-in!) remains untouched.

Blimey, I love books. Actual books, with covers and blurbs and bookmarks I’ve left in them, and bent-back spines and tea stains.

Love ‘em.

These are the things I did when Orion’s Fiction head, Susan Lamb, rang to give me the news:

1: I didn’t believe what I was hearing. Each time she told me, my brain scrambled the information. She had to be very, very patient, viz:

SL: The Richard and Judy Book Club has been considering Jubilee, and we’ve just heard that it made the final list.

Me: That’s utterly fab! When do I hear if it’s made the final list?

SL: It has made the final list

Me: Brilliant! But when do we hear about the Book Club choices?

SL Jubilee is a Book Club choice.

Me: I’m stoked! So, what are its chances of…you know…actually being picked?

2: I put down the phone and danced to the following songs:

Florence and the Machine: Dog Days are Over*

Take That: Shine

The dance was a bold fusion of twenties flapper, nineties rave victim and seventies Top of the Pops groundling. I jumped around my writing room. I grandstanded on my reading chair. I stopped briefly because I thought the kitten might be getting frightened.

3: I called my editor and agent to make sure I hadn’t imagined it, and found we had all imagined the same thing.

4: And then I went to pick up my kids from school. As usual.

*Actually, that video is reminiscent of the infamous Total Eclipse of the Heart, isn’t it? Never mind.

Several places at my fantasy dinner party are taken by Radio 4 stalwarts: Jenni Murray (we are not worthy), the razor-sharp Jane Garvey, and PM’s Eddie Mair, who occupies a particular place in my heart. Eddie’s funny, and he gets compassionately angry over injustice; you can hear it quite clearly, beating away beneath his journalistic objectivity. Wonderful stuff.

As is true with all relationships, I can’t claim to love every aspect of Radio 4. There’s You and Yours (aural Daily Mail*), annoyingly on over lunchtime so that I’m kind-of forced to listen to it, and the occasional quiz show which seems to have plucked its contestants through a hole in the space-time continuum:

Contestant: The third movement of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.

Quizmaster: Correct! In 1962, four loveable moptops released Love Me Do, their first single. The name of the band?

Contestant: Erm…

Voice radio lives in my head, engaging my brain while my body’s busy doing mundane things: paying bills, making tea or driving home. But sometimes, what I’m hearing makes me stop everything. A while ago, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing was broadcast as the Saturday Drama. I’d never encountered it before, and it was instantly and comprehensively transfixing; I didn’t move until it was over.

Living in Paris for a year, I could still get Radio 4 on A.M. I remember being in my bedsit on the night that Pip was born (we’re onto The Archers now – keep up). In the street below, cars were hooting and people were yelling at each other in a satisfyingly Gallic way, but all I cared about, perched on my sofa bed, was that Phil Archer was about to discover that his first grandchild was named after him. And then they said her name! And then he didn’t cotton on! And then they had to tell him! And you could just hear how moved he was! I cried like the proverbial; don’t even get me started.

From left: David, Ruth, herdsman Sam

Book at Bedtime seems to engage me in a particularly intimate way; there is a deep comfort to be had in the sound of a human voice telling us a story. The late-night broadcast time means there are minimal distractions (in my case, those distractions have been put to bed hours before), and I can focus on it with less need to rush, more time to reflect.

When I was newly-married, I had to spend three months in Portsmouth on a training course away from my husband. At the weekends I’d drive back home to see him, but Monday to Friday we were apart. I missed him with a fierce, unpragmatic passion. On the first night I retired to bed and switched on the radio for company. I pulled the duvet right up until my poor, tragic eyes were peeking out over the top of it, and listened to Book at Bedtime. They were doing Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack. Bloody hell, it was good. By night two I was gripped. By night three I’d almost forgotten how appallingly hard-done-by I was.

It seems amazing that Jubilee might enter other people’s heads while they’re cleaning their teeth, or washing up, or going to bed in a strop. I am proud and excited like nobody’s business, and I cannot wait to hear it.

*I couldn’t bear to link it. Sorry.

I’ll just run that by you again: Intelligent Women’s Reads.

Now, I’m going to be optimistic here and operate under the assumption that the adjective is being applied to the books, rather than the women. If not, we have a whole new problem to deal with.

What are intelligent women’s reads? Well they aren’t ‘Glitz’, as that has a category of its own. Nor are they ‘Romance’, ‘Regional Sagas’ or ‘Historical Fiction’, because they’re also taken care of elsewhere. Presumably the readers of those novels are still struggling to achieve doubt-digit IQs, poor souls. I’d better drop a note to Sarah Waters and ask her to write in monosyllables for the next one.

What are ‘women’s reads’ in the first place? I’m curious about this because it seems – both anecdotally and objectively – that women make up the majority of fiction readers anyway; wouldn’t ‘Men’s Reads’ be more to the point? This is no academic exercise – The Bookseller serves…well…booksellers. And they need to manage their categories in order to…you know…sell books. Men are demonstrably easier to categorise: they buy less fiction, and the fiction they buy tends to be narrower in scope.

A survey conducted by Lisa Jardine and Annie Watkins revealed as much: women were found to have catholic reading tastes, enjoying a broad range of titles by both genders and all sorts of genres; male readers were more limited in every respect. Of their top twenty titles, only one was by a female author. ‘Is it churlish of us,’ asked Jardine and Watkins, ‘To suspect that some men did not realise that Harper [Lee] was a woman?’ Yes, it is a bit churlish.

Made me laugh, though.

The concept of ‘women’s reads’ then, seems far less useful to the trade than its alternative. Is it churlish of me to suspect that ‘men’s reads’ hasn’t been embraced because of the way it belittles male customers?

And what of those ‘intelligent reads’? Unfortunately, the implication – that ‘women’s reads’ are, by default, unintelligent – is one which women have become accustomed to over the last couple of centuries. There’s a catch 22 here: the literary forms most beloved by women are accorded a low status because women readers are because women are, and we know they’re dumb – have you seen what they’re reading?

My colleagues who write ‘women’s commercial fiction’ are well-used to the snobbery directed at their novels (and their readers). They are resigned to comforting themselves with the royalties. And that, perhaps, is where the answer lies. Because at the moment there’s a gulf between the power that women fiction readers actually have (we bankroll the operation, ladies), and the powerlessness implied by a situation in which a disroportionate number of male book reviewers focus on a disproportionate number of male-authored books, while scant respect is accorded to women’s reading habits.

I feel it may be time for some action. We could do it seriously (like the two women who asked W H Smith to stop using the label ‘Women’s Fiction’; Smiths agreed), or we could have some fun with it. What do you reckon? Personally, I’m sneaking into my local bookshop with a sign saying ‘Intelligent Men’s Reads’. Think I might put it up next to my favourite Alan Bennett.

Instead of which, my quite unbelievably gorgeous paperback cover looks like this:

I know – you want to stroke it, don’t you? Me too.

I am quite happy to admit that, for me, a book’s cover design really, really matters. A novel is primarily a story – but it’s also an artefact, and preferably a beautiful one. Publishers agree. In fact, they agree now more than ever, in the era of the ebook, when printed novels need to set themselves apart and show off their USP. There are lots of little pleasures available to readers of Real Books; I was delighted to find, halfway through reading Lloyd Shepherd’s The English Monster, that it sports two cover designs. Beneath the dustjacket, on the book boards themselves, there’s a glossy red reproduction of an engraving. And, if you would like to join me in a little cover porn, here are four more books whose designs are an absolute pleasure – worthy of the cover price alone.

Now, I don’t mean to sound shallow here, but this book is very, very lovely, and even more so in the flesh, because the buildings are drawn in gold. If you’re starting to think that it’s a little too blingtastic, or maybe feel that you’re above such fripperies, let me challenge you to read this beauty without – just occasionally – stopping to close it again and admire its cover.

This is simple, elegant and witty, a subtle joke made by someone who’s clever, but not vulgar enough to advertise the fact: brilliant design.

We’ll have to wait until August for this novel, the design of which has given me severe cover envy. I love the huge expanse of sky and the simplicity of the title.

Finally, this is my favourite book cover of all time. When I read the novel, I sometimes used to just look at it sitting on my bedside table, and heave a deep, satisfied sigh.

I don’t think it can be equalled – but you undoubtedly disagree. So, what are your nominations for Most Beautiful Cover of All Time?

This latter may play better to all-male audiences.

I am enduringly fascinated by superheroes and by their superpowers – real or imagined – so I’m excited to be hosting an extract from Freaks by Caroline Smailes & Nik Perring (illustrated by Darren Craske). The book is full of dark humour, offering bite-sized stories about what happens when ordinary people are endowed with superpowers. There’s The Photocopier (who can reproduce herself at will), and a man who breaks into his lover’s dream, and a (filthy) woman who wears My Little Pony pants; I won’t tell you what her superpower is. Enjoy this taster of the book – and I’ll see you in a village hall, some time in 2015:

SUPER POWER:

The ability to make

oneself unseen to

the naked eye

Invisible

If I stay totally still,

if I stand right tall,

with me back against the school wall,

close to the science room’s window,

with me feet together,

pointing straight,

aiming forward,

if I make me hands into tight fists,

make me arms dead straight,

if I push me arms into me sides,

if I squeeze me thighs,

stop me wee,

if me belly doesn’t shake,

if me boobs don’t wobble,

if I close me eyes tight,

so tight that it makes me whole face scrunch,

if I push me lips into me mouth,

if I make me teeth bite me lips together,

if I hardly breathe,

if I don’t say a word.

Then,

I’ll magic meself invisible,

and them lasses will leave me alone

Suffice to say that we were very invested. Steve empathised with this; his own first novel, TAG, had just gone out to publishers and the first responses were starting to come in. TAG went on to be published by Cinnamon Press, was longlisted for Welsh Book of the Year and won the Media Wales Readers’ Prize by popular vote.

What I remember from that first meeting is commiserating with him; it must be so tough, I said, to be on tenterhooks, not to know whether your project would succeed or fail. Not really, said Steve, looking off into the middle distance – a sort of literary catalogue model – I’ve started on the next one now.

That next one was Life! Death! Prizes!, snapped up by Bloomsbury, published today, and already larded with praise by the great and the good. A.L. Kennedy says it’s ‘raw, funny and heartfelt…a fine achievement,’ and Kate Long has called Steve ‘the new Nick Hornby’.

I lured him away from his book tour to ask him about the novel.

1: Welcome, Steve. Tell us five things about yourself

Father, Son, Husband, Brother, Reader, Writer, innocent bystander. Someone who can’t follow rules and who can’t someone who can’t count up to five. Numbers and rules have always been problematic

2: What can you tell us about Life! Death! Prizes!?

A single mother is killed in a bungled street robbery. Her oldest child (Billy, 19) has to become mother and father to his younger half-brother (Oscar 6). It is, of course, a comedy. Billy tells the story and I hope his voice is funny, angry, vengeful, hopeful, desperate and life-affirming by turns. It’s a funny book, but one that is not afraid to nod to the darkness. Love it or hate it, I don’t think you’ll have read much like it.

3: From the first sentence the reader is pulled into the world of the narrator, Billy; his voice is incredibly strong and very compelling. I’m especially struck by the fine balance you achieve between the tragic circumstances in which Billy finds himself, and the self-possession of his voice – he’s no passive victim. How did you go about ‘finding’ Billy?

Billy emerged from the shadows quite slowly. The original draft was narrated by a 30something, but Billy wouldn’t be ignored and eventually took over the whole thing. He was quite a skeletal character at first but he put on muscle over the couple of years of drafting the book. And he’s capable of surprises. He certainly surprised me…

4: The ex-teacher in me wants to ask the ex-teacher in you: why two books narrated (in the case of TAG, part-narrated) by young people? What is it about teenagers’ voices which is so compelling for you? (And how much have you filched from your students?)

Adolescence is such a strange time. Young people go out onto a gory battlefield before their armour has arrived. You have to brave to get through it. It’s no place for cissies. It has that in common with old age I think. All good writing is about paying close attention and the young characters in my two books come from paying attention first and foremost to my own memories and to the part of my adolescent self that moves through me even now (quite a big part as it turns out). And then from paying attention to my children and also, yes, to all the school students I’ve taught. And then a strange alchemy happens where experience and observation are fused and altered and turned into something new. That alchemical process is imagination I guess.

5: TAG was published by Cinnamon, a small independent press, and Life! Death! Prizes! by Bloomsbury (a huge independent publisher). How different has the process been, this time round?

I’m very grateful to Cinnamon Press. They took a chance when no one else would. And they do wonders with no resources. I didn’t get edited very much then however and this time Helen Garnons-Williams at Bloomsbury has been very strict with me. Such a relief. And you do know that with Bloomsbury you’re at the centre of a very professional, very committed team. I’m the only amateur in the squad. Oh and they have nutritionists, psychologists, masseuses, personal trainers, string quartets, inhouse confectioners, jesters… whatever it takes to coax out the best work from an author…

6: Somebody once told me you can tell a lot about a writer when you know who they’re jealous of. So – which writer(s) are you most jealous of?

I’ve never read One Day. And that’s pure envy. For a while it seemed that a special One Day Act had been rushed through parliament that meant all rail passengers had to have a copy on them at all times, along with their ticket. Every train I went on everyone was reading it (and I take a lot of trains). I’ve never read any Harry Potters either. That Jane Rowling seems pretty flukey. I think you can deduce from this that I’m up for selling insane numbers of my books. And you’d be right. I’m ambitious like that. I want readers – lots of them. I’ve laboured in the dark too long.

7: Recommend a book, please.

Revolution In The Head by Ian Macdonald. You think you know The Beatles records and then you read this and they sound completely different. He committed suicide a few years back and I’m still angry with him for that. I’d have loved to see that erudition applied to other great musicians.

8: What do you wish I’d asked you?

Oh that’s hard… You could have asked why it took me so long to get started (I was 43 when my first book came out) though the answer would have been disappointing – laziness, disorganisation, a feeling that writing books wasn’t for the likes of me, the ten years I spent off my face…