As a reader, I read quite widely.

We leap to conclusions and remember those conclusions as fact. We react on our own prejudices but don't always recognize them as such.

We are unreliable narrators - all of us.

One of my desert island books, 'The Leopard' is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.

Some writers you return to again and again, and for me, Nancy Mitford is one of them.

If I'm writing a furiously angry scene, I have to consciously snap out of it when I shut down the computer, or I find myself growling at my family.

I absolutely adore classic crime and read a huge amount as a teen - Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Sherlock Holmes, Josephine Tey, and many more.

Seeing my book on a billboard in New York was a bucket-list-type thing, but also a deeply surreal moment. I had to keep reminding myself that, oh, yes, I wrote that book.

I write as if I'm someone reading the book - often people ask if I write one strand first and then go back and seed in the other, but I don't think I could keep track of who knows what, and the tension would come out wrong, so the answer is no - I write it more or less in the order you read it.

I really enjoy writing about female friendship. It's an endlessly interesting dynamic for me.