“While many authors make their name with a particular style – an emotional, first-person narrative or a detached, poetic musing on life – Smith’s strength lies in her ability to straddle different genres, hopping and jumping to inhabit different voices. Her two most recent works, Feel Free and Grand Union are very different. Feel Free is an essay collection, about topics from Justin Bieber to Brexit and climate change, while Grand Union is a collection of short stories. Yet, I would say they are my two favourite works by her.”

When one is an early learner of French, and trying to graduate from textbooks to real books, there are suggestions that appear again and again. Le Petit Prince is charming and readable, Tintin has an endless back catalogue, and L’Etranger by Albert Camus is every single teacher’s go-to. However, if you want to veer carefully off the beaten track, the Belgian author, Amélie Nothomb, is an excellent choice (you can also read her in translation).