A reader has sent me a photo of my new book on his garden table in rural Western Australia (see photo).

It’s astonishing to me to think of this book, a copy of which I have photographed on my own garden table, flying to the other side of the world to start a conversation with someone new. For a long time, the words lived inside my head and were gradually transferred to my computer, where I was the only person who looked at them and worked on them.

As the words settled into some kind of permanent shape, I did start to imagine other people reading them, but those imaginary readers were somehow ‘in the cloud’, bobbing about weightlessly like Renaissance cherubs; I didn’t visualise them in actual locations. So to see that the book (or, I should say, a copy of the book) has travelled, independently of me, all the way to the hills of Western Australia is startling and extremely pleasing.