I gather it’s not terribly fashionable when a nosy neighbour on a bus, train or plane enquires as to why you chose the certain memoir or novel sitting open in your lap, to turn and answer ‘because it was cheap’. And yet, around a certain time of year, that’s so often the only conclusion I come to. It’s become something of a tradition to spend the first half of my year working through a stack of paperbacks I pick up for a pittance from the great Lifeline Bookfest. I am neither skint nor stingy, I don’t cut my own hair or hang tea bags on the clothesline for reuse, but I am drawn to the Bookfest for all its many wonders. Imagine it from above—the Times Square of lavender rinses and tricked-out trolleys. People bump and scrape like loose dodgems against long wooden tables, all taking part in this ritual of frantic literary fossicking—sorting the panned gold from, well, the shit nuggets. It’s always fun to try and guess which blockbuster series will be the most recycled in any given year. This year it belonged to Stieg Larsson—Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Long French Braid, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Accidently Dropped Her Groceries In The Rain—you know, all the hits.

In previous years my finds have been everything from the savoured, the devoured and the re-read (Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Shalom Auslander’s Beware of God) to the sadly unopened, highly efficient doorstops (Carlos Fuentes’ Happy Families, David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon). This year I was excited to discover, poking out between Delusions of Grandma by Carrie Fischer and Hollywood Husbands by Jackie Collins, was the book Letters Home—a collection of correspondence from 1950-1963, mostly addressed to her mother, written by Sylvia Plath. First published 13 years after the poet and novelist took her own life in London’s bitter winter of 1963, the letters are selected and edited by Plath’s mother Aurelia, who also provides occasional commentary.