I was a small-town prairie boy whose featureless, unbroken horizons were filled only with what could be conjured from dreams and, as I grew up, the endless supply of books I borrowed from our local library, where trespassing dust trembled nervously in the thin shafts of light slanting through the windows’ wooden slats as if wary of discovery. And it was in this same library that I first imagined I was in love, in love with Mrs Hartford, one of the two librarians and mother of two boys who attended the same school as I did. I’d watch her through the stacks, surreptitiously part the spines of books to allow my view, secretly track the course of her work routines by listening for the press of her black patent shoes against the wooden floorboards, but if she so much as smiled at someone she probably thought of as a serious boy and keen reader, I’d blush and lower my head to whatever text I was studying, momentarily mortified by the thought that she could read my adoration as plainly as the words on a page. I would always wait to ensure that she was at the front desk and the one to stamp my books and, as she did it, I’d feast on the piled and pinned glory of her hair, the delicacy of her fingers, the whiteness of the underside of her wrist. Hoped one day she might come to work with the pins removed from her hair so it fell in auburn drifts about her shoulders. Hoped she’d be impressed by my reading choices. Perhaps those months of painful infatuation were the genesis of my sense that love and books are somehow sensually indivisible, that one can’t fully exist without the other.

What little of the world that existed outside my library-book pages had been pared even more by an evangelical Presbyterian upbringing and decent but plain-living parents. My father, who had an agricultural seed business, was an elder in our local red-brick church, superintendent of its Sunday school, and his sea of faith never ebbed throughout the rest of his life, until that life was stolen by something else. A faith symbolised by a burning bush, but what smouldered unquenched through my late teenage years was a desire for something and somewhere to which I couldn’t even give a name, much less understand how it might be attained, until gradually those stories with which I had grown up came to be overlaid with different ones. So Jonah and his whale was replaced by an old man struggling to land a giant fish – an old man who in his youth from the deck of his boat had seen lions walking on an African beach – and the feeding of the five thousand was pushed aside by what felt like the even greater miracle of Rose of Sharon suckling a dying man. And these stories gave me a different world in which to live, told me I wasn’t crazy and more than anything that I wasn’t alone, while whispering that the seemingly endless stretch to the horizon might in time come to be filled with something I hoped would reveal itself to be love.