WHAT BOOK would novelist Sebastian Barry take to a desert island?

…are you reading now?

Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty And Time by Gaia Vince.

It’s poignant and maybe downright perverse that we are only coming to a popular understanding of ourselves just as we might be going over, in our lemming-like fashion, the cliff of climate criminality. But here is the miraculous creature we are: unlikely, poignant, astonishing.

It is interesting that there is no part of the brain particularly given over to language — it pervades every part. And yet music and words are sisters, more or less.

Much to think about, before we wave goodbye to ourselves. This book gives rise to many such thoughts and, for all its science, is written with merciful clarity. Was ever a writer for this topic graced with a more fitting first name?

…would you take to a desert island?

The Collected Poems of Jack Gilbert would be as permanently fertile as any other book. He was, impossibly, the laureate of fiery Detroit, or at least a native son.

When I lived in Greece in 1980, he had a house the other side of our mountain. His beloved fellow poet Linda Gregg had a house neighbouring to mine. One day on the old mountain track — a surface of worn Parian marble, a fringe of herbs and snakes in the twilight — I bumped into Gilbert briefly. He looked like a Roman emperor in miniature, steely and intent — Marcus Aurelius (above) maybe.

We greeted each other, we passed by. We said almost nothing, but for some reason, I often think of him there. He is dead now, as is Linda. But truly dead? Unlikely. His glorious poems are proof of Einsteinian time.

…first gave you the reading bug?

A vexed question, because it is my memory that I couldn’t read till I was eight or so. I don’t remember it being a huge problem, though I do recall my teacher sitting me down with one of the brighter pupils to try and learn. I only remember how beautiful she was. But it didn’t help me read.

Finally, we returned to Ireland, and at the little National School in Dalkey, after first retrieving an Irish accent for fear of being murdered in the yard for my London one, they had a book called the Catholic Catechism. Who made the world? God made the world? An immediately interesting plot, then. And small words, and helpfully spoken out loud. My parents were agnostic so I had never heard such things.

Gradually though it opened up the previously closed world of the shelves and shelves of Penguin paperbacks with their red spines in my father’s bookcase.

…left you cold?

A book that leaves you cold might not necessarily be a bad book, of course. Almost any book will be rejected by some.

Maybe I loved many of his poems too much, but it was painful trying to get through Sir Philip Sidney’s The Old Arcadia. I read it in the summer break from Trinity College, and I still remember its strange and ancient landscapes. Also, I read it in rather similar Arcadian circumstances, aged 20, sitting by a beautiful little river in Coolattin, Wicklow, with my then seven-year-old brother wading there eternally, catching minnows in his bucket. So it should have been perfect. But the chill of an evaporated classicism drove my heart from that book.

• Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, A Thousand Moons, is published by Faber on March 19 at £18.99.