"Sometimes people ask me if I am from a bookish family. I find it
difficult to answer. One answer would be no, not in the traditional
sense. My father left school at thirteen and my mother at sixteen. But
another answer is: Christ, yes, they really were. Like a lot of
working-class English people, in the Fifties and Sixties my father found
his cultural life transformed by Allen Lane's Penguin paperback
revolution. Now anyone could read Camus or D.H. Lawrence or Maupassant,
for no more than a price of a pack of fags."
Zady Smith, "Library Life."
