WHAT BOOK would Booker-shortlisted author Lucy EllMann take to a desert island? 

. . . are you reading now?

Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg’s latest story collection — and not just because it’s got ducks in the title! Eisenberg’s kind of cornered the short story.

She’s got a rare breadth, and her characters speak so well. She never over-describes. There’s no dross. She’s intellectual, ferocious, deep and very involving. ‘Cross Off and Move On’ is a thrilling depiction of an impossible mother who’s tough even on the dead. At a funeral, unable to stomach the lavish praise bestowed on the deceased, she heckles ‘By God, they’re burying the wrong woman!’

In the title story, a painter is lured to an artists’ retreat by a wealthy couple who turn out to be totally cracked and self-obsessed. It’s enough to put you off patrons for life.

. . . first gave you the reading bug?

I felt an early allegiance to Ludwig Bemelmans. The Madeline books are a delight — the pictures are not just amusing but atmospheric and often beautiful. And there are such memorable lines: ‘She studied the postmark, and then fast and faster they rushed to the scene of the disaster’ became a family catchphrase. Miss Clavel is some gal! Not so good at counting her charges maybe, but effective when roused.

Bemelmans, an Austrian hotelier who emigrated to New York, never lost his sense of Europe — you can see it in all his work. The ornate railway stations, the ancient customs, the formalities of school life. The humanity. The book that grabbed me most was Madeline And The Gypsies. Who doesn’t want to be abandoned by authority figures and enlisted as a circus performer? ‘How wonderful to float in a pool, Watch other children go to school, Never to have to brush your teeth, And never — never — to go to sleep.’ It’s what you hope adulthood will be like.

. . . would you take to a desert island?

Cheating, I’d take a volume of Jane Austen’s complete works. I seem to need her: I come back to her all the time. Pride And Prejudice is one of the most perfectly formed art works in the world. Emma is modernistic in its penetration of the heroine’s inner thoughts. Persuasion is tender, touching, sad — it may not be the wittiest one, but there’s frankness and satire, especially about Anne’s dreadful sister Mary.

In all of them, though, there is a feminist edge that is too often ignored by Janeites. If only Austen, instead of Andrew Davies, had finished Sanditon! (No film adaptation of Austen works, by the way, because you lose the authorial voice.) But still, the Sanditon fragment we have is pure mischief, and very promising. It starts with an upset carriage, and would no doubt have ended with an uplifting marriage. It is terrible that she ever died.

. . . left you cold?

Almost all non-fiction (except Virginia Woolf’s). I can’t absorb information presented in this way. Non-fiction is like maths to me, an impenetrable wall. And it’s not just when it’s all facts, figures and stats.

I hate even more the new style of American non-fiction, wherein the writer keeps digressing about what the major or minor personages in the book ate for breakfast, or the founding of the university they attended and other wholly irrelevant elements of backstory.

It’s just padding, meant to sound warm and welcoming, as if you’re sitting with ol’ grampa on the porch swing and he’s telling you stories. It imitates fiction — but then why not just be honest and write fiction?

Fiction allows real thinking to occur. Non-fiction is just a way of beating around the bush.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann is published by Galley Beggar Press, £14