‘I’ve been a bookseller for the last 26 years and have surrounded myself with stories for a lot longer than that. I know how lucky I am to get so much pleasure from my work – I spend each day reading books, discovering books, buying and selling books and talking about books with a vast number of people I greatly admire. But no amount of immersion in the bookselling industry could possibly have prepared me for the experience of seeing my first novel published and, however comfortable I am in the bookselling world, I know with nerve-tingling certainty, in this context, I’m a rookie once more.
