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A stark recounting of Sissay's childhood and the way the care system and systemic racism failed him. Even though it was a story of a pretty dark account, I wanted it o be longer to recount how he dealt with those issues after he left the care system at 18, but perhaps that's coming in a future volume.

It's very easy to be fearless about your writing practice when, faced with writers' block, your husband can surprise you with a week's holiday in a luxury resort in Costa Rica.

This has one of my personal bugbears - constantly shifting perspective within scenes. Sometimes this can work, especially if it's making a wider point in the structure of the story, but here it's unfocused and jumping, making it hard to follow who is thinking what and who knows what at any particular point in a scene. A shame, because the central idea here of looking at two hundred or more years of history with a black lesbian vampire at the heart of the story is very good and throws up lots of interesting angles and ideas. The idea of powerful billionaires hunting vampires in order to secure their own immortality rings a lot differently now, when powerful men are literally injecting the blood of the young, than it might have done when originally published in the 90s.

Yes, yes, I should read the original before watching the adaptation, but sometimes you can't help it. What's interesting here is the way the TV series tells the story in a much more conventional way than the novel, especially omitting the framing device that allows the novel to speed through many parts. There are times when I wished it would slow down a little and explore ideas a bit more, but it's a good read and raises a lot of interesting questions - and what if our whole existence is just part of a fable to explain the lost history of a distant future?