The novelist on why he can’t read JRR Tolkein, being hooked on Muriel Spark and obsessed with James Joyce

My earliest reading memory
In west Africa, where I was born in 1952, in Ghana to be precise. Aged about five, reading Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book in a large-format, copiously illustrated edition.

My favourite book growing up
The Basil Duke Lee stories by F Scott Fitzgerald. They are not well known. I read them in my early teens. They are heavily autobiographical – Fitzgerald was writing about his own adolescence. For the first time, it seemed, a writer spoke directly to me. “Yes,” I thought, “this is exactly how I feel.”