IN THE YEARS after my parents died, I remember grown-ups telling me that my parents were looking down on me, as if having ghost parents was just as good as having real ones. It made me want to punch them in the face.

AS A WRITER AND literature lover, I have more than a few books. Each year they seem to multiply. Four floor-to-ceiling bookshelves cover an entire wall in the room at the front of our house. In our kitchen sit two more waist-height shelves, while a third flanks my writing desk at the top of the stairs. Our home office could be renamed ‘The Library’, since it houses even more books than the front room – five full-sized shelves crammed with books stacked horizontally and vertically. There is, of course, another bookshelf in the bedroom. On the rare evenings when I am not aching with fatigue, I comb the spines of these books in search of company. There is no formal system of organisation – books tend to migrate from one shelf to another at different times, though my most prized volumes (such as Jessica Au’s 2022 novel Cold Enough for Snow or Yūko Tsushima’s 1979 novel Territory of Light) live almost entirely upstairs. Occasionally, when I take my writing to a café or go on a writing residency, I slip them into my bag.