Steinbeck, Nabokov, Woolf, Joyce (‘These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here.’), and Eliot are the ones that spring to my mind.

This line from Middlemarch is one of the few I can quote by heart: ‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

I read Annihilation for my book club a few months ago - it was so unlike anything I would normally read (generally more into the destructive love triangles of inter-war aristocrats and Bloomsbury square intellectuals than sci-fi cosmic horror), but I thought it was a great read.

The image of the dolphin with a human eye still makes my skin crawl.