In 'Like it Matters', each line of text, each mark on the page, is meticulously crafted as the novel charts, with striking flair, the life of a man cast adrift.

'And then the colours rush in and spoil everything. Drums pull her back, out of the silence and the Amazon green, into yellow and blue and red - too much red. It swirls in front of her. The drums are deafening, and she smells the heat of bodies.'

'Sometimes the thing you find is not the one you were looking for.'

James Joyce takes his schizophrenic daughter to the great healers of Europe, to whom he said, "She's not mad, she's a genius like me, exploring the unconscious." When arriving at Jung's doorstep, he said to Joyce, "You're a genius - she's nuts; the difference is you're diving, she's falling."

"All our actions want to honour the spirit in all things - bugs, microbes, rocks, animals, plants, planets. Magical kinship should be encouraged at all times, for it is what makes life bearable."

Hours seem to slip by unnoticed when listening to audio books on the days spent making notebooks in my studio. About to begin The House at Riverton by Kate Morton with 18 delicious hours ahead of me.

I loved The Art of Hearing Heartbeats losing myself in the story. Yet in the sequel, A Well Tempered Heart, I keep hoping to get lost in the same way but alas I have less than an hour to go. I'm listening to the audio book so perhaps it is the reader that's preventing the sweet abandon.

"But somewhere between Geological Time and Human Time, Alma posited, there was something else - Moss Time. By comparison to Geological Time, Moss Time was blindingly fast, for mosses could make progress in a thousand years that a stone could not dream of accomplishing in a million."