Your first choice is Wilbur Smith’s When the Lion Feeds, a book which got you hooked on family sagas.

Yes, it is the first of the Courtney sagas. Lots of school boys get hooked on Wilbur Smith, and there are of course grown men who love them too, so he seems to go across the board. I started reading him when I was about 14 or 15, and now the series runs to about 12 or 13 books. I thought it was brilliantly clever. It is like a soap opera where every book is the next chapter of the story.

For those who don’t know, who is Sean Courtney?

He is the hero of the first few books. He was born in the 1860s and lived in South Africa, so his life is nicely timed to coincide with the Zulu risings and diamond hunting and all that. He is quite a respectable old man by the time the Boer War comes along. And he ends up becoming a patriarch to this massive family. I love the whole family dynasty, family saga concept.

It is a good way of relating history.

I think it brings it to life. There is this idea of character traits passed down from generation to generation. When there is a union and a baby is created, and that baby grows up, if the writer is clever he can make it a creation of both its parents.

Next up is One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which really helped you to write engagingly about family history – how?

This book put a bit of a sheen on Wilbur [Smith] because it is so beautifully written. I just loved all the different aspects of it. There is such inventive language and concepts, and the whole magical realism thing really appeals to me. There is humour as well, and you don’t get that much humour in old Wilbur to be fair! In this book there are seven generations of a family with a very definite beginning and end. It begins with José Arcadio Buendía, who founds the town of Macondo in the Latin American jungle, and the book follows his family over the next 100 years. Each member of the family has pretty obscure things happening to them right up until the extraordinary and brilliant finale.

How has it helped you with your work?

Even though it is a fictional novel, it enabled me to look at family history from a much more stimulating perspective, with family traits cascading down through the generations.