Ella, you’re a bibliotherapist – what exactly is that?

Bibliotherapy is the art of prescribing fiction for life’s ailments. People come to us and tell us about their issues – be it getting married, getting divorced, having children or needing a career change – and we prescribe books to help them through life’s hurdles. We also talk about reading ailments, such as not being able to concentrate on reading because there are too many other distractions, or being overwhelmed by the number of books in the world.

That’s an ailment we’re familiar with at FiveBooks, with our archive of almost 4,000 recommended books.

It’s a common problem. We also look at how people can bring reading into their relationships. For instance we suggest reading aloud to your partner, making time to read together, or memorising passages of literature for moments of stress.

So an individual or couple comes to you with a problem, which you diagnose and address by recommending books rather than through talking?

Yes. We obviously talk about the problem, but we’re not psychotherapists. It’s not a medical cure, it’s a reading cure. Our remit is to come up with a few perfect books which are going to help them address their issues. Our prescription is normally eight novels. We suggest some books that look at their problem in a way that they can empathise with, by seeing how someone else deals with the same problem. But we also might recommend a book that acts as a balm, simply by taking the person out of that mindset.

Escapist fiction as a cure?

Exactly. So if someone has been bereaved, they might want to read a book that is going to take them to completely another place, like a Jilly Cooper or a Dick Francis, to get them out of their mood.

And why do you feel that reading therapy is as effective as psychotherapy?

When you read fiction, you actually take on the persona of the author and the characters. You effectively live another life through reading a book. And by inhabiting the psyche of another person you are fundamentally changed. It might be temporary, but by living that other life for a short time you can alter your own personality and perceptions.

You must get this a lot, but your library must be huge. Is it part of your job to read a lot?

Absolutely. In order to do that I listen to audiobooks all day when I’m doing other things – because I’m also a mother and a painter. I try not to neglect my children when listening to literature! I also read all night long, if possible.

Here you’ve chosen five novels about love. Indeed, love is one of literature’s greatest themes – along with death. But is love describable at all?

I think all the books I’m suggesting do that in very different ways. And there are a lot of other fantastic books not on this list which analyse love in even more detail, such as Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love. Or Ivan Turgenev’s First Love, an amazing description of the total loss of power in the presence of someone else. So yes, I feel great writers can capture the feeling of being in love. That’s partly why we like to read them – through them we can experience love without having to actually be in love ourselves.

Yet we inevitably view love through the prism of our own experience.

I agree, but I do think you can get into the skin of another person in love. That’s the greatness of literature – you can suspend your own sense of self. Most people who come to bibliotherapists want that sense of losing themselves in fiction. They often miss the ability to do that, which they had as a child but have lost as an adult and are trying to get back. Some of the best works of literature about love work so well because you lose your own sense of self, and effectively fall in love with the characters in the book.