I have consistently loved books that I've read when I've been sick in bed.

I had walked along that street all my life, but had never been so aware that my back was to my home

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

Don't write about what you know - write about what you're interested in. Don't write about yourself - you aren't as interesting as you think.

Although I always said that I wanted to be a writer from childhood, I hadn't actually done much about it until I came to London.

It was not a house where secrets could be kept easily.

Say something worth the words.