Book lover: Linwood Barclay

Linwood Barclay is a best-selling Canadian thriller writer whose latest novel, A Tap On The Window (Hachette), is out now.

The book I love the most is ... Praise The Human Season, a novel by an Ohio writer named Don Robertson. He managed to make a tale about ordinary people feel epic.

The book I'm reading right now is... Black and Blue by Ian Rankin. How did I miss one of his most highly acclaimed novels about Rebus?

The book I'd like to read next is... Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen, or maybe Stephen King's The Shining. I want to reread it before the long-awaited sequel, Doctor Sleep, comes out.
My favourite bookshop is ... A Different Drummer Books in Burlington, Ontario.

The book that changed me is ... Tough one. The Goodbye Look by Ross Macdonald. I discovered this in a grocery store when I was 15, drawn in by a cover blurb saying the Lew Archer novels were the finest series of detective books ever written by an American.

The book I wish I'd never read is ... It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to write even a bad book, so I find it difficult to trash other authors publicly. However, if they are dead, I suppose I don't have to worry about hurting their feelings. So I'm going with Chaucer. I know The Canterbury Tales is a classic, but when I studied it in school, I wanted to blow my brains out.