One Minute With: Reggie Nadelson

Where are you now and what can you see?

I'm in my Notting Hill flat in London looking out on to the trees in the garden. For a New Yorker, this passes for a house on the beach.

What are you currently reading?

Philip Roth's Sabbath Theater, as well as re-reading I Married a Communist.

Choose a favourite author, and say why you like her/him

Alice Munro, whom I adore. I'm not normally a short story lover but she gets a whole world into a few pages and is probably the greatest stylist.

Describe the room where you usually write

In New York, I live in a loft on the fourth floor of a a former manufacturing building. I like to call it my Jewish Princess loft.

What distracts you from writing?

Everything, especially looking out of the window from my apartment in downtown Manhattan where there are a lot of films being made.

Which fictional character most resembles you?

For me and for ten million girls growing up, it was Jane Eyre . Now, I think it might be Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It or a character from a Woody Allen film.

What are your readers like when you meet them?

The great ones who are really obsessed readers and who almost believe the characters are real. I also have a lot of male readers as thriller writing is traditionally a male genre.

Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

Right now, it's Barack Obama, the man from Krypton, our saviour: where did they get this guy? After eight years of walking around London, apologising every time for our president, I can now say "we have such a lovely one and you don't!"

Reggie Nadelson's 'Londongrad' is published by Atlantic Books