Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

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.

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.

She liked the way his smile took a long time to arrive and just as long to leave.

I have no control, of course, over how I'm marketed. It's a sad thing, though, that so many people perceive literature to be gendered. The idea that some subjects are male and some are female is just preposterous to me. It's reductive and nonsensical, to separate writers and subjects and plots along gender lines. It's meaningless.

Two and a half thousand left-handed people are killed every year using things made for right-handed people.

I met a retired police detective. And he said to me that the interesting thing about heatwaves, from a police perspective, is that the number of people who just walk out of their lives when the weather gets unbearable is astronomic. He said the police prepare themselves for it - for a huge rise in the instances of missing persons. People choose to disappear when it's hot. It was fascinating.