We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.

People had tell me the most personal things. People I'd never met before would say thing like "Oh, that was the summer I had an affair with my neighbor." The 1976 heatwave occupies a peculiar place in people's psyches.

Motherhood is all-encompassing, and in a way, as the mother, you're the star of the household.

The Chilean novelist Isabel Allende says there's no such thing as writer's block, you just need to live a bit more. I try to bear that in mind.

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.

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.

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.