Before I start writing a book, I always know three things:

* The story

* The title

* The epigraph

These, for me, are the foundations from which the writing is built. Choosing the epigraph is an important task for me, and one I enjoy immensely. I am an avid reader, and a keen collector of quotations; I keep a notebook in which I write down lines from poems and literature that speak to me. When I am looking for an epigraph – the quotation that stands at the front of a book like a thematic gate, giving a feel for the tone and mood and key meaning of the story to come – I sit down with my notebook and read through it, and usually a quote jumps out at me.

The epigraph for Burning Embers was one such quotation from my notebook that I had collected many years before:

The source is unknown for this quote, despite my research. Usually, though, I am able to ascertain the author, even if the source is not widely known. The following quotation, for example, which I used as the epigraph for my latest novel Legacy, is from a poem entitled ‘Fate’, which I found some years ago in The Little Book of American Poets, 1787–1900:

The poet, Susan Marr Spalding, is not widely known; indeed it is difficult to learn much about her from online research. I had jotted down her poem years before, because I loved its depiction of destiny and the epic nature of the love described. I remembered the essence of the poem while plotting Legacy, and was delighted to find it in my notebook and see it was the perfect fit as an epigraph.

Of course, it is perfectly possible that the essence of that poem had remained with me over the years, and quietly inspired me. Certainly, this was the case with the epigraphs for Indiscretion:

I devoured the works of Federico Garcia Lorca when I was dreaming up the story for Indiscretion (see my article ‘Favourite poet: Federico Garcia Lorca’). As for the Spanish proverb; I think that had been in my mind since I first visited Spain, in my twenties, and I met its impassioned people.

Given that my degree was in literature, I am well read in the classics, and this serves me well when looking for a fitting epigraph. For Masquerade, the epigraph was obvious to me from the outset:

It is from Lord Byron’s masterpiece, the epic work Don Juan. The poem extends to seventeen cantos but was left unfinished when he died; still, it is a wonderful source of wit and wisdom. I have always especially liked: ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart,/’Tis woman’s whole existence.’

Finally, we come to The Echoes of Love. For this book, I turned to two poets whose quotations appear frequently in the pages of my notebook:

The title of the book, The Echoes of Love, was in part inspired by these quotations; there is such a mournful, poignant feel to that word echo; it is something at once unreal – a reflection of reality – and yet resonant and powerful.

It is not always easy to select an epigraph; I put a lot of thought into it. What I really enjoy about this part of the writing process, though, is the excuse it gives me to delve into my notebook and into literary sources. Ultimately, the epigraph, through connecting a book to the work of another writer(s), shows a simple truth about writing:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent

– John Donne, Meditation XVII