Patricia Duncker is a reader’s writer, an absurd thing to say perhaps, until you see the amount of books she takes with her wherever she goes, and the range of those books, from classics and the latest literary titles, through the genres to mountaineering conquests. Perhaps it is why she has never written the same book twice, or to put it another way, why the style and subject of her novels varies so widely.

Her first novel, Hallucinating Foucault won the Dillons First Fiction Award and the McKitterick Prize and has a quiet cult status. Set mainly in France, a student pursues and tries to ‘rescue’ from madness his subject, the writer Paul Michel. Patricia plunged into historical fiction with James Miranda Barry an ‘account’ of the life of the 19th century colonial doctor, duelist and socialite who lived her life as a man. The Deadly Space Between is a psychological thriller about 18-year-old Toby Hawk and his mother's enigmatic new lover. Her latest novel Miss Webster and Chérif was published in May.

Patricia has published two collections of short stories, Monsieur Shoushana's Lemon Trees, is fuelled by jealousy, passion and revenge, and she merely upped the ante in all these themes with her you-get-what-is-says-on-the-can second collection Seven Tales of Sex and Death.