Peter James

"I was ill-prepared for childhood. Mother was a prominent Liberal Democrat backbencher. My father, whom I saw rarely, lived in a tree. At age 20, I fell in with a group of intellectual refugees from Wisbech College of Further Education. We talked politics and Proust. We smoked Smarties. On sunny days, we burned ants with a magnifying glass. At last I knew real happiness. Then I came to Bray Leino, and everything changed."