The books that inspired Briefly, a Delicious Life weren't texts I turned to for research - I didn't read them in the library while trying to figure out what I was writing. I did that kind of research too, poring over George Sand's A Winter in Majorca and The Story of My Life. I read her letters, and Chopin's, and biographies of both of them, making huge spreadsheets of dates and events and quotes, none of which I now remember in detail. But the books that really inspired the novel are those that I read purely for pleasure; they lodged themselves in my brain when I first read them and simply insisted on exerting a pressure on the story I was telling. 

I don't think I'll ever forget the shock and wonder I felt as a teenager on reading the opening chapter of Ali Smith's Hotel World. I couldn't believe writing could do that, could be voice and idea and surprise and wit and tragedy all at once, could be queer in every sense of the word, in a way that made such perfect sense to me. It seemed so effortless. I found it flabbergasting. What's strange is that, though I adored the novel, I didn't think about it at all while writing Briefly. It was only afterwards, when I glanced at my draft having taken a break from them, that I realised how much my book owes to a book I read twenty years ago. 

The other books on this list have had a similar effect on me: they are  queer texts that settled into my thinking, almost without my knowledge, and which found their way into my first novel. I wonder whether that's often a feature of debuts: a lifetime of reading gets filtered into them - everything that has ever inspired us, provoked us, made us wish that we had thought of it first. To the writers of the queer stories and books on this list I owe a great debt: I'm so grateful to them for shaping my brain, and my heart, and my work.