Two words sum up my first ever visit to the London Book Fair: inspiring and exhausting.

Everywhere you looked book titles and posters shouted at you from the wealth of publishers’ stands. I saw national displays from Armenia, China, Czech Republic, Iceland, Latvia, Slovakia and the Sultanate of Oman to name but a few.

I liked the Russian slogan: Read Deep, Read Moscow, Read Russia. I also liked the way the International Rights Centre, reached by a vertiginous escalator, was divided into sections: Austen; Chaucer, Dickens, Woolf.

1950s Liverpool. In the tight-knit Irish Catholic community of the Four Streets, two girls are growing up.

One is motherless - and hated by the cold woman who is determined to take her dead mother's place. Will her adored father wake up to what is happening before it is too late?

The other is hiding a dreadful secret which she dare not let slip to anyone, lest it rips the heart out of the community. And yet, how long can she possibly live with it?

We will release eBooks of all 21 of Ellis Peters' Cadfael Chronicles on 1 June 2014. It is the first time the genre-defining, bestselling medieval crime series has been available electronically.

When we moved to Burnt Norton fifteen years ago I was given an old newspaper article. It told of a night in September 1741 when Sir William Keyt then owner of Norton House set fire to his bed curtains and burnt himself to death in the house he had so recently completed.

To research the historical detail, first I contacted some of the local Keyt descendents. A direct descendent of Sir William sent me a family tree and from this I was able to build a picture of his family. Afterwards I contacted the Gloucestershire County Council who sent me an engraving of the house before the fire. Another source of information was the church. Gravestones and parish registers confirmed dates of baptism and death, they also gave me a snapshot into the past.

As books hit the shelves last week, James Naughtie, the face of the Proms and presenter of BBC Radio 4's Today programme, was to be found launching The Madness of July at the picturesque ICA. Spotted in the crowd were such luminaries as

If any unfortunate soul should ever ask me which books I read, I’d tell them I have broad taste, everything from Austen to Zola. I’d list my favourite books; Little Dorrit, Catch 22, The Heart Of Darkness. After all that, I’d finally admit that, these days, I mostly read crime novels. I would then describe, in great detail, the differences between crime and mystery fiction, between sub-genres, styles, authors.