My sister Kate recently loaned me her copy of Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story by Paul Auster. It’s a lovely little book: case bound, cloth backed, with smashing illustrations by ISOL. It’s not a long story (it’ll take you half an hour to read it), but it contains all of Auster’s favourite tricks: mistaken identity, repetition, coincidence, a story-within-a-story, repetition… All of which made me remember why I love reading the moody Manhattanite.

After an extended Eastery hiatus, here’s a new Reading List drawing. I’m part way through the short story collection The Illustrated Man by nonagenarian science fiction grand poobah Ray Bradbury. I first got into the silvery haired fantasist over twenty years ago, thanks to Burnley Central Library and, despite my disappointment that the jet-packs he’s been promising since the 1940s have yet to materialise, he’s still a stellar wordsmith.

Time to bring a bit of class to proceedings. And who better to do so than Dame Agatha Christie DBE?

Whodunnit? I did. With a pencil. In the front room.