Below, this month’s selected ELLE Book Club author, AM Homes answers our quick fire questions. Add AM’s novel May We Be Forgiven to your reading list now along with Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn (‘a spectacular book of stories’) and Ben Marcus’, Leaving The Sea - they all come highly recommended by AM.

ELLE: What book do you wish you had written?

AM Homes: The Bible (think big).

ELLE: The first book you loved?

AM: A picture book called, This Is Venice, one of a series that includes, This Is Paris, This Is London—I loved them all.

ELLE: What book do you always give as a gift?

AM: Richard Yates, 11 Kinds of Loneliness

ELLE: What are your working rituals?

AM: Write longhand and type up what I write daily. Otherwise I can't read my own handwriting...

ELLE: Which character that you've written do you relate to most?

AM: I'll be obvious and say the character in my memoir, The Mistresses's Daughter, also known as ME. The other characters really are works of fiction.

ELLE: If you could go backwards or forward in time where would you go?

AM: I'd go back to 1960 and visit my biological parents as they were ‘dating’.

ELLE: Which author's fictional world would you most like to inhabit?

AM: J.K. Rowling's.

ELLE: When did you last cry?

AM: Yesterday and I may again today as well.

ELLE: How do you take your coffee?

AM: Milk, no sugar

ELLE: What quote inspires you?

AM: Albert Einstein’s ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.’

Join the ELLE Book Club here