The book I am currently reading

Before I read digitally, I’d be reading perhaps 10 books simultaneously – but now I read as many as 50 at once, if you mean by “currently reading” books I’ve begun, left off, and returned to. So, I’m reading everything from Michel Houellebecq’s Submission to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals and back again via Mary Beard’s polemical Women & Power.

The book that changed my life

Kafka’s Metamorphosis: when I read the opening sentence, aged 15, I thought, “This is extraordinary – this long-dead Czech writer has just made me entirely suspend disbelief in this transmogrification – and he’s done it not with expensive special effects and a vast film crew, but just a few black marks on a white page.” It was then that I became certain I wanted to be a writer.

The book I wish I’d written

I just wish I’d written better books – better in every respect: more impassioned, deeper, more resonant – books that would perhaps have changed others’ lives the way Kafka’s did mine.

The book that had the greatest influence on me

Hard to say. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night had a big effect … on my rhythm … my phrasing … and in particular … my punctuation.

The book I think is most overrated

All that bullshit about how the Harry Potter books were going to turn a generation of otherwise uninterested boys into literary mavens – we could’ve done without that. The truth is that the books ushered in the dumb kidult era we’re currently having to endure, with illiteracy rates significantly on the rise for the first time in a century!

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read? Ashamed before whom? No – I don’t think so

The book that changed my mind

Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin. Before reading it – and, admittedly, discussing it with its author – I thought of pornography as essentially a free speech issue; afterwards, I saw that it was a crime – and by no means a victimless one.

The last book that made me cry

Henry Williamson’s Dandelion Days – when I was 12.

The last book that made me laugh

I can’t think of any book I’ve ever read that hasn’t made me laugh at some point – there’s even some hollow and deeply ironic laughter resounding in the Stygian pages of Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man.

The book I couldn’t finish

See above: now I read scores – perhaps hundreds – of books at once, I’m released from the compulsion to complete any given volume. In the digital realm, texts merge into and swim out of each other – this is the great palimpsest of pixels that is steadily replacing the physical (and intellectual) canon.

The book I’m most ashamed not to have read

Ashamed before whom? God? My mum who’s been dead for 30 years? Some notional bourgeois-minded intellectual out there judging me? No – I don’t think so.

The book I give as a gift

JR Ackerley’s My Father and Myself – a brilliant memoir, and an exquisite account of social reality in the early 20th century, rather than the Downton Abbeyesque bullshit most writers come up with.

The book I’d most like to be remembered for

The latest one – Phone: the Guardian published a Long Read recently that detailed the cover-ups surrounding the British Army’s abuse of Iraqi detainees after the 2003 invasion – my novel covers this difficult and disputed territory,and as far as I’m aware, I’m the only British literary novelist to have ventured into it at all. 2016 – what with Brexit and Trump – was a good year to bury the Chilcott Report, and along with it the bad news about the establishment’s cupidity and hypocrisy – my novel, I believe, does what satiric literature should do: afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted.

My earliest reading memory

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – a beautiful hardback edition with full-colour plates of the Teniel illustrations. Bliss!

My comfort read

Um, do you know who I am?