"Rhys had the daring idea to give life to the the lady in the attic of Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre.” An erotic, evocative, sumptuous and beautiful voice liberating Antionette."

"This destroyed me. It’s about examining the choices in Levy’s life that lead her to a particular event documented in the book, but at the same time the book has a lot of joy in it. Many of female writers that I admire at the moment have that same stripped back, modernist style—a kind of reportage. It’s also liberating to write about something that awful in such bare, stark terms."

"When I was 10, I was in my own world. Getting a digital radio in my room was a really big thing for me. This tiny little speaker. It was really liberating, like there was something happening in my room at all times. I was obsessed with radio and knew everything that was going on. I’d listen to the Top 40 countdown every week, and there was this band Queen that kept coming up. I loved “Another One Bites the Dust.” A friend of mine told me that song was about war and killing people, and, again there was something about the evil and the fear of it that appealed to me. I remember the DJ saying, “This is No. 1 on the black charts.” So I thought Queen was black. Years later, I saw their record cover—and realized they weren’t black"

"I had an older friend who was hugely into dance music. He was a proper teenager with decks. That was all cool to us. The Prodigy were absolutely the band of the moment, we would just listen to them so much. You always feel like you're listening to a real drummer with The Prodigy, even though you're not and you're listening to highly processed drums, they always retain a sense of reality. To this day, The Prodigy have a sense of rawness and aggression and reality, and they have always felt like a real band to me, even though it's just a guy with a laptop and a couple of idiots jumping around. They made the world shift for me, and made me feel like I didn't have to choose between a PC and Nirvana, and that's liberating, knowing I could do anything I want. The music I have in this Baker's Dozen is influential, because the albums are all about breaking rules, or don't fit into camps, and that's where my band has always been. People don't really know what to call us or describe us, and that has come from having diverse influences. The best bands don't fit."