Virginia Evans: ‘I loved books about things that can’t exist’

The Women’s prize-shortlisted novelist on taking inspiration from John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Jhumpa Lahiri, and weeping through Little Women in her 30s My earliest reading memory I’m not sure what we were reading – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams or the poems in Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein – but I was undoubtedly with my sister, two years older, who set the example for me to be a reader. I picture us in the back of our family car or laying across our twin beds...

By Virginia Evans