The Girl Who Couldn’t See Faces is my first novel. Although the events and characters portrayed in it are fictional, the descriptions of face-blindness are based on my own experiences of living with this condition. Fortunately my symptoms are at the milder end of the spectrum, so even though I might occasionally blank a neighbour or a casual acquaintance, when they wave at me and say hello I usually figure out who they are very quickly. From time to time though, I’ve found myself in the disconcerting situation of being deep in conversation with someone who obviously knows me really well, and yet I can’t recognise them at all. I only realised I had face blindness five years ago, and it suddenly made sense of those embarrassing times in my childhood when people came up to me, saying my name, and I’d stare at them in puzzlement and deny knowledge of ever having met them before.