The novelist on her love of Virginia Woolf, being inspired by HG Wells and how Jack Kerouac’s ego puts her off his books
My earliest reading memory
I was in my grandmother’s house in Ankara, Turkey. I must have been six years old. I learned how to read from Grandma’s cookbooks and traditional Middle Eastern love stories – Layla and Majnun, Ferhat and Shirin.
My favourite book growing up
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Back then a company in Turkey had published the story as a graphic novel, and I adored it. I not only read and reread the novel, but also painted every little drawing in it – the bonnets, the gowns, the guillotine. I loved history and I now realise that perhaps there was something personal going on as well: after my parents separated, my father stayed in France and remarried. He had another family, half-French, half-Turkish. We were completely estranged for a long, long time. So I was especially interested in books that had a connection with the bloody history in France.
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