Jodi Taylor

Let’s start with the traditional opening while I struggle to get my brain in gear.Why and how did you begin writing? Do you know, I can’t think of a time when I didn’t write... I was one of those horribly precocious children who was always writing plays and forcing their siblings and friends to act them out. In sixth form I wrote my first musical, then wrote all through uni until becoming a journalist. The idea was to be a TV Scriptwriter - I did my MA in that.

This is a wonderfully clever black comedy of tangled relationships, sinister events, deception, downright lying, copious amounts of alcohol and inappropriate sex. Together with an impeccably timed series of shocks peppered throughout the whole book, I tore through the whole thing much, much too quickly. In fact, I loved it so much that I went straight back to the beginning to read it again, because I’m pretty sure some of the finer points passed me by.

This is another of T Kingfisher’s belting gothic horror stories. The year is 1899 and this is the story of Sonia Wilson, a young scientific illustrator, desperate for a job – any job – after her father’s death leaves her penniless. Arriving in North Carolina, she takes up a position with the slightly sinister Dr Halder, who hires her to illustrate his enormous collection of, quite frankly, even more sinister insects.