I’ve had the good fortune of spending most of my life working with books in one way or another—as an editor, as a writer, occasionally as a teacher. There are books all over the house, and their grasp on domestic geography reaches beyond the back door and into the garden to my studio, which was once the storeroom for a shop. Nine bookcases, one coffee table, a sofa, four desks, two filing cabinets, sundry benchtops—books in, or on, them all. (None, I should add, on the bedside table; I hate reading in bed.)

There’s a ‘sort of’ logic to all of this. One of the bookcases holds all the books I’ve edited, another has my reference books, and there are two for books I’ve collected during the researching of two novels. There’s a smallish antique piece for my smallish collection of antiquarian volumes, mostly early Western Australian publications (including a first edition of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo). They’re foxed and shabby and bear handwritten inscriptions and cryptic notes—not especially desirable, I’m told, as far as antiquarian value is concerned. But I like them that way; they have their own history. On my writing desk at the moment are John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, Roget’s Thesaurus, Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots, a French dictionary, and a cluster of poetry books I dip into from time to time. The books that can be seen beneath the glass top of the coffee table are the ones I haven’t read yet—stacks of them. Julienne van Loon’s Harmless and Felicity Young’s Antidote to Murder are on the top. There’s a purple-jacketed Kindle there, too, but I use that only when I’m travelling. Eventually, books migrate from the coffee table to the sofa, where I do most of my non-work-related reading.