Books that grab me and won’t let go tend to be written from an intensely personal point of view and often feature a young protagonist, such as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, or Dog Boy by Eva Hornung. Dog Boy haunts me, actually, and Room by Emma Donoghue threatens to do the same. (I haven’t figured out yet what this means for my own writing.) Others, like A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton or We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver, are set in the ordinariness of day-to-day life interrupted by an extraordinary occurrence. As a child and well into my teens, I escaped to Narnia and the safety of Aslan whenever life events were  overwhelming. I wonder what books have a hold on you?