How many books does Anne Sebba have on the go at once?

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What Book... 

Biographer and author, Anne Sebba

...are you reading now?

I always have three books on the go as I listen to one while I walk for an hour each day, have one on my desk which is work related and one by my bedside for pleasure.

The Virago Book Of Friendship by Rachel Cooke, is the one for pleasure right now and is in fact about friendships between women as Cooke believes there is already enough written about men’s.

It’s a subject I have been thinking about for the past few years as small friendship groups were crucial to keeping up flagging spirits in concentration camps during the War, as I delved into in my new book, but is an underexplored subject in literature.

This is a perfect book to keep by your bedside, for inspiration of course, but then to send you to explore the books from which the extracts are taken, including diaries, poetry, memoir and romance.

Are women’s friendships more complex and intense than men’s? Reading this, I think yes.

...would you take to a desert island?

Viktor Frankl and Man’s Search For Meaning is a book of such profound wisdom and courage that I constantly return to pages I have marked in the past.

Whenever I think of the Second World War, remembering that I was born in its deep shadow, I ask myself what would I have done?

Of course, I hope I would be brave and join the resistance but, until we’re tested, none of us knows. Reading Frankl is a reminder to make the best possible use of each moment.

...first gave you the reading bug?

Food for the imagination: John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love good and exciting stories and would carry home handfuls from my local library.

Enid Blyton’s adventures and Noel Streatfeild’s family dramas and all the Heidi books by Johanna Spyri. I would hide under the bedclothes with a torch to read long after I was allowed in spite of (or perhaps to test?) my mother’s oft repeated warnings that I would spoil my eyesight!

I have a memory of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress being the first book read to me at nursery school but, rather than frightening me, it developed my imagination. 

I see myself as a storyteller above all. Life is stories and how we make sense of them determines how we live.

...left you cold?

The world is full of so many wonderful books I don’t want to waste my breath on those I couldn’t cope with. But, if you insist… Tristram Shandy.

The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz is available now from the Mail Bookshop