This is the BBC.

Hello, I'm Kristi Young.

Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item,

that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.

You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.

Music

My cast away this week is the writer Jane Garden.

She's published over 30 books, winning not just a Legion of Loyal fans, but the Whittred Prize, twice.

Her work spans novels for children and adults and collections of short stories, and is as impressive in its variety as its style,

from detailed domestic dramas to fantastic epics.

Much like the narrator on the first page of her first ever book, she herself is not quite normal, having only begun writing aged 40,

on the day that the youngest of her three children started school.

Although she describes her own childhood as luminous and almost deliriously happy, aged six she suffered two significant traumas falling backwards into a fire and losing the attention of her mother.

She says of her work, I don't have a story in my head to begin with, I brood and think, apparently doing nothing for ages, and then I write in a huge frenzy.

You've described your stories as being given to you to do.

Wonder what you mean by that?

I think nearly always I seem to know, yes that's it, off you go.

But what happens before is quite long and tiresome and agonizing very often, is it worth doing.

Sometimes it's perfectly obvious from early on, but usually I wait for a sort of sign really.

It's a sort of cheerfulness you need, you know. The miseries are over.

You write very beautifully, highly intelligently, you write about love, about friendship, about loss, about happenstance.

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