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Richard Flanagan: ‘When I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop it had corked badly’

The Booker-winning author on taking inspiration from Kafka, and a youthful passion for Jackie Collins

My earliest reading memory
My mother reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to me – and reading it again and again, because I loved it and her. I was perhaps three. We lived in a little mining town in the middle of the rainforest. It was always raining and the rain drummed on the tin roof. To this day that’s the sound I long to hear when I relax into a book – a voice in the stormy dark reminding me that I am not alone.

My favourite book growing up
Books were an odyssey in which I lost and found myself, with new favourites being constantly supplanted by fresh astonishments. Rather than a favourite book I had a favourite place: the local public library. I enjoyed an inestimable amount of trash, beginning with comics and slowly venturing out into penny dreadful westerns and bad science fiction and on to the wonderfully lurid pulp of Harold Robbins, Henri Charrière, Alistair MacLean and Jackie Collins, erratically veering towards the beckoning mysteries of the adult world.

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Apple Changes App Store Rules in EU to Comply with Antitrust Order

Apple has changed rules and fees in its App Store in the EU after the bloc's antitrust regulators ordered it to remove commercial barriers to sending customers outside the store. Apple said developers will pay a 20 percent processing fee for purchases made via the App Store, though the fees could go as low as 13 percent for Apple's small-business program.