I grew up in old, complicated buildings, with stairs and hallways and vestibules and landings, with attics and cellars and even a boiler room. And I grew up looking out of windows, because we always lived upstairs, and living in the centre of town, because these buildings – a nineteenth-century hotel and an Art Deco block of flats – were close to railway stations and surrounded by shops. My sister and I didn’t play in backyards – we played inside. And inside always seemed bigger than outside.

When I started to read, it was easy for me to believe that you could get to another universe through a wardrobe door. The buildings I grew up in had so many unexpected portals and dead ends, you felt you could have found almost anything around any corner. I guess that’s why the landscape that has always intrigued me most is the landscape within. It has all the mountains and rivers and forests and wildernesses, all the wind and rain and snow and clement sunshine, all the calm seas and tempests, all the meadows and rocky paths there are outside. But the space on the outside can only be so big. The space on the inside is infinite.

Cassandra Golds