When I was a child, my parents would buy me a new book every month. I was always hungry for wardrobes to walk through, and not just because of the Narnia books. The wardrobe is a great metaphor for reading: you go from this reality, with its concerns, into a different, more contained, safer world.

I’ve developed a range of masking mechanisms to cope with my stammer. A stammerer only ever stammers on a small number of sounds, and over time they change. I remember being scared of being nine because I couldn’t say ‘nine’, and I knew I’d be asked how old I was all the time.

I lived in Japan from 1994 to 2002 [he met his wife, Keiko, there]; about two and a quarter of my novels are set there.

I took about eight months off from my [teaching] job and travelled to Tokyo, Hong Kong, the South of China, and went on the Trans-Siberian Express from Mongolia to St Petersburg – pretty much all the places in my first book, Ghostwritten.

My books look complicated but they’re actually quite simple plots, there are just a number of them. When our son was two or three and newly diagnosed with autism (he’s 10 now), my wife found The Reason I Jump [a book by Naoki Higashida, a Japanese boy who has autism] on Amazon Japan. It was the first thing we’d found that translated his behaviour into a language we could understand. So we translated it to give it to people who were helping with our son. When I mentioned it to my editor and agent, they wanted to publish it. It’s now in 34 languages.

Slade House (£12.99, Sceptre) is out now

My daughter, who is 13, is a critical and voracious reader. She knows more about Middle Earth than I do. I’m very proud of her too.

My newest book, Slade House, is about apparent ghosts in an apparent haunted house that invites guests into itself every nine years, and they find more than they bargained for. Writing can combine genres – you don’t need to be pigeonholed into one if you can think through the cracks and make it your own.

David's life in books

Tom’s Midnight Garden, by Philippa Pearce This made a lasting impression on me. It was the first book I ever read that showed me how they could stir up emotions in you.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff Some books age wonderfully, and some less well. I re-read this trilogy again recently and it was even better than I remember it.

Le Grand Meaulnes (The Lost Domain), by Henri Alain-Fournier I read this at 18 or 19 and can’t quite capture why it’s so beautiful, but it is. If something’s French and has been in print for over 50 years, then read it.

David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens It swallowed me up. It isn’t some improving, late-1970s thing that’s on BBC2 – it’s clever and funny and angry and comic.

Short stories, by Anton Chekhov He was my gateway drug into the heavyweight Russians – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gogol. I read them as addictively as I did Game of Thrones.

Foster, by Claire Keegan An Irish author. She hasn’t written much, but it’s as good as Chekhov. There’s nothing wrong with it, not a word.

Interview by Kate Bussmann

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