For the national year of reading, here is a book that, in Phillip Adams’s words, brings ‘a new perspective’ to the art of reading. As a child, Relph had a reading disability; now he is a psychoanalyst and professional conversationalist whose memoir explores why our relationships with authors and characters can be as vital as any we form in ‘real life’. Robert Dessaix says this ‘conversation about literature’ is one that ‘few readers will be able to resist joining’. Brenda Walker calls it a ‘warm and profound book about the deep value of thoughtfulness, of loving and reading’.