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She is certain that the trees are going to wake up and speak to her, but they don’t quite and she has to wait. There’s a lovely bit where Lucy (my favourite character) wanders in a wood at night in the moonlight. It’s hard to choose one above the others - and it would depend on the day you asked me - but today I’m going to say Prince Caspian. My favourite books as a child were probably the Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis. The childhood book that’s stayed with you. I was astonished by all the parallels between the two, by details in the Borges’s story of which I’d no memory, but which resurfaced in Piranesi.

I had vague memories of it and considered it one of the stories which had influenced Piranesi. After I had finished writing Piranesi I reread The House of Asterion, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges about a labyrinth. Sometimes I don’t even need to remember them consciously. Very often these are stories I’ve read long ago.

I build my fiction on the foundation of other stories I’ve read. That must help us understand each other - even if only a little. I think there is a great value in the way fiction allows you to become other people for a while, to see the world from their point of view. I feel sure that books have moulded me and taught me all kinds of things - though these thing are so much a part of me now that it’s difficult to stand back and identify them. It never bothered me whether the main character in the book was female or male, I identifed with them regardless. I was particularly fond of historical novels and spent a lot of my childhood in the medieval period. Like a lot of bookish children I was always happier inside a story than I was in the real world. What impact have books have had on you as a person and an author?

Susanna is the author of two other books, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.

This week, we're hearing from Susanna Clarke, who recently won the Women's Prize for Fiction 2021 with her novel, Piranesi. Welcome to The books that shaped me - a Good Housekeeping series in which authors talk us through the reads that stand out for them.