Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer?

I’m going to have to say Muriel Spark. She was an international best seller in her time but seemed to fade from view. In this her centenary year fans have been shouting her name from the rooftops. There are new editions of her novels (I’ve contributed an introduction to her New York novel, “The Hothouse by the East River”), and two places in Edinburgh (the city of her birth) have been named in her honor. She remains an author of great power and complexity.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

I grew up in a home with few books. My parents left school at 14 or 15 and I only ever remember them reading books on summer vacation. But comics provided affordable literacy and I got hooked on them — Batman, Superman, Fantastic Four, etc. Our village library was both refuge and place of wonder to me, and soon I realized that there were movies I wasn’t allowed to see (the likes of “The Godfather” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” being restricted to those 15 and over) but that no librarian or bookseller was going to censor the written versions. Those were the books I began to devour, and soon enough I was trying to write my own comics and stories.

Favorite childhood literary character or hero?

I’d probably have to come back to comics again and say Batman. Such colorful adventures and mind-bending villains. The village of my childhood may have been gray, but my imaginative world was kaleidoscopic and technicolor.

What’s the last book you recommended to a member of your family?

Having devoured Kate Atkinson’s “Transcription,” I then pressed it on to my wife Miranda — not that she needed much encouraging! We met at university, both of us studying literature. Miranda also reads a lot of mystery fiction and is the first reader of any new manuscript of mine. She’s not slow to pass comment, so my novels have already been “edited” before they go near my publisher.

What’s the best book you ever received as a gift?

When I was a postgraduate student (writing a thesis on Muriel Spark), a friend presented me with a birthday gift of the first three volumes of Anthony Powell’s 12-novel sequence “A Dance to the Music of Time.” Powell was a terrible snob and his books mostly deal with the upper crust and their lives of privilege. But he was also an extremely elegant stylist and though I was reluctant I became a fan, devouring all 12 volumes. We follow the central character, Nicholas Jenkins, from school days through World War II to eventual old age as a respected novelist. The cast is large and memorable and I learned a lot from Powell about how to write about a central character who ages over the course of an extended sequence.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Maybe the poems of Robert Burns. President Trump has Scottish blood on his mother’s side, so Burns seems apt. The “poet of the common man” is full of wisdom, empathy and humanity along with a respect of the natural world and its fragility.

And the prime minister?

The current British prime minister could do worse than read something European, perhaps a history of the continent, especially post-World War II.