What book are you reading now?

I always seem to have a few books on the go at any one time and that’s no different this summer. One of those at the moment is The Half Bird by Susan Smillie.

It’s a wonderful recounting of the author’s solo journey by sailboat from southern England to Greece when she decides to radically change her life.

The second book I’m reading is Richard Wagamese’s Starlight. I came to his work late and this book was unfinished at the time of his death in 2017, but what a powerful and luminous novel he created about learning from the land in Western Canada and how it can help heal broken lives.

What book would you take to a desert island?

It’s so hard to choose just one but I’m going to say Kathleen Jamie’s Findings. It’s a beautifully written series of short essays about our place in the world and finding the wild nearby in her native Scotland.

'there are times in life when a particular book will leave its mark on you and other times when it won’t'

Just as importantly, though, she’s perhaps the finest writer working today when it comes to paying close attention to our surroundings. A skill that could come in quite useful on a desert island!

What first gave you the reading bug?

This is an easy one because my mum named me after one of the characters! It was Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books.

But it was more than just the incredible adventures and close companionship of the children that appealed to me in this series; Blyton invested those kids with an amazing amount of agency and responsibility, as well as a knack for getting themselves out of sticky situations on their own, which felt so incredibly inspiring and empowering when reading them as a young boy.

What book left you cold?

I adored JD Salinger’s The Catcher In The Rye when I was a teenager, but when I went back to it again as an adult it didn’t resonate with me like it had before.

Which isn’t so much about the book leaving me cold, as acknowledging that there are times in life when a particular book will leave its mark on you and other times when it won’t. Sometimes books change as you change and sometimes they don’t. The key is finding the right book at the right time in life.

Lifelines by Julian Hoffman (Elliott & Thompson, £10.99) is out now in paperback.