My father reading the poems of Ogden Nash. He delighted in silliness, and I delighted in anything he found funny, and so they have stayed vivid since earliest childhood, unlike anything I was later made to memorise at school. At six I learned that “Candy is dandy; but liquor is quicker .
Sound advice, even if it came a little early. . I longed also to be left on my own island, alone with only my ingenuity and a feral wolf for company.
It made childhood seem not a time of powerlessness but of such competence and courage. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë did peculiar things to my romantic expectations as a young teenager, from which – it took some time to recover. I think I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I’ve been conscious of imagination, but I read AS Byatt’s at 20 and felt electrified.
She described a lemon in a bowl of plums, and that image hangs in my mind’s eye like a painting. I read and thought, I want to make beauty, just like this. by Salman Rushdie.
I tried too young and failed. Then I moved to New York and listened to Lyndam Gregory’s incredible audio recording and walked and walked, spellbound. I crisscrossed Manhattan just to live inside that book, and I now have the most powerful .
synaesthesia; I can tell you where I stood on the High Line when Rushdie first described the grasshopper-green chutney; I know in which bodega I was buying Swedish Fish when Saleem Senai found out the truth about his identity. by George Eliot is bordering on an obsession of mine. I read it for the first time only three years ago, and I think I’ve reread it seven or eight times since.
It would be my desert island book without hesitation – I would be taking a town with me, and a world. The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St Aubyn. Not because I didn’t enjoy them – quite the opposite.
It was, because I read them with such a ferocious intensity that for those days I Patrick Melrose, entirely consumed by the experience and by the novels themselves. It was almost Christmas, I was alone, and it felt as if all I did was swallow one and then the next; I remember calling my then local bookshop just as it was closing and pleading, urgently, that I absolutely must have the next one . The bookseller took payment on the phone, then hid the volume for me beneath a bench on his way home.
It felt like a drug deal, appropriately enough. Those books and that immersion are so deep in me now I need never go back. Samantha Harvey’s .
Its meditative loveliness is a tonic after the brilliant and painful bodyslam of Miranda July’s All Fours, which I’ve just finished. It’s slim and I am deliberately taking my time with it – bobbing around weightlessly, tending to my dwarf wheat experiments; watching the steady progress of a typhoon; looking back with love and longing at faraway Earth. by Elizabeth Jane Howard.
So many of my favourites are series, for I’m a homebody and when I find somewhere that brings me joy I want to move in. If ever I’m overtired or feeling low I pick up or , and imagine myself staking up the raspberries and holding the Duchy’s trug, or drinking a generous Gin and It and gossiping with Villy and Sybil. I’ve read those books so often, they are memories of mine; I’m convinced it all happened to me.
• Francesca Segal’s Welcome to Glorious Tuga is published by Chatto & Windus. To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at . Delivery charges may apply.
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