You wanted to put cotton wool around them, to protect them”. The atmosphere in the room has changed. Elliot Perlman is suddenly speaking with great intensity and feeling as he remembers the Holocaust survivors he knew in Melbourne, where he grew up in the 1960s and ’70s. The Holocaust is the subject of his outstanding novel, The Street Sweeper, published earlier this year.

When it comes to writers, Czernowitz — first Austro-Hungarian, then Romanian, now Ukrainian — surely merits its own Appellation d’origine contrôlée. There must be something in its terroir that causes (or caused) it to produce so many great novelists and poets: Aharon Appelfeld, Norman Manea, Dan Pagis, Paul Celan; not to mention Gregor von Rezzori.

In June 1940, a small boy and several members of his extended family — parents, uncles, aunts and cousins —– were bound by ship for England, on the run from occupied Belgium.

Guy Ableman is a moderately successful novelist. Before he started to write novels, he was working in his mother’s designer boutique in Wilmslow, and it was here that he fell under the spell of Poppy and Vanessa, a beautiful mother and daughter who could pass as sisters.

I first heard Moshe Dayan’s name when I was nine. It was June 1 1967. Israel was surrounded by Arab armies poised to attack. And it was my birthday. My dad gave me a big hug and said: “Son, the state of Israel has given you a birthday present — they’ve just nominated Moshe Dayan to the post of Defence Minister!”

If it’s true that all literature is about death, then Will Self’s new Man Booker-longlisted homage to the modernist novel is exemplary. It is all about Death, specifically Audrey Death, a victim of encephalitis lethargia, or “sleeping sickness”.

He writes in a language spoken by a mere seven million people. But he is revered as the master of modern Bulgarian poetry. And he is the only person in the world to have translated the complete works of Shakespeare in verse. He was 92 earlier this year and his name is Valeri Nissim Mevorah, better known by his pen-name, Valeri Petrov.

Richard Ford is one of America’s leading writers, best known for The Sportswriter (1986). Born in Mississippi, he has a dark sense of life in modern America, but none of his previous novels are as dark as Canada, which, the first sentence tells us, is a story of robbery and murders.