As other authors have realized, heat can have a strange effect on us, can cause odd chemical reactions in the brain. Heat can bring out secrets; it can change people's personalities.

Listen. The trees in this story are stirring, trembling, readjusting themselves. A breeze is coming in gusts off the sea, and it is almost as if the trees know, in their restlessness, in their head-tossing impatience, that something is about to happen.

We're much better at dealing with dyslexia today than in 50th, but reading difficulties are still a problem in the U.K. I believe there's currently something like eleven thousand functionally illiterate adults in the U.K.

It is a terrible thing to want something you cannot have. It takes you over. I couldn't think straight because of it. There was no one else, I realized, whom I could possibly tell.

I always had the urge to write. Not in the sense of wanting to be a writer, but just writing things down, getting words on a page. Graphomania, it's called. I've always had a definite love of stationary products - I used to spend all my pocket-money on pens and notepads. I still do, in a way.

There was so much anti-Irish sentiment not just from other kids at the school I went to in Britain, but also the teachers themselves. I remember very clearly a lot of the things people said to me and my sisters. And of course those sentiments go back a long way. When my dad visited London in the 50s and was looking for somewhere to stay, there were signs outside boarding houses that said "No blacks, no Irish."

She has spent most of the day reading and is feeling rather out of touch with reality, as if her own life has become insubstantial in the face of the fiction she's been absorbed in.