Home is one of those migrant words that changes meaning over the course of a life. As a child of two cultures, I was aware from an early age that I had two homes: one in England and one in France, each with its separate family, traditions, food and language. That meant I was never completely at home in any single place, but it also meant that my comfort zone could occupy multiple territories. Home was the people who loved me, and how they left their mark on the world: through gardening, cooking and music – but most of all, through stories.

Stories are how we stay in touch with home, my mother used to tell me. Stories of our family in France; of people and places I only knew through her stories. People and places could be lost, but through stories could always be found again.

Later, when I discovered books, I realised that home could be Narnia, or Gormenghast, or AA Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood. Growing up as a bookish child, my natural home was the library: there I explored other worlds, other lives. There I could not only be myself, but anyone else I wanted to be.

I first joined Barnsley library on my seventh birthday. It was a dusty suite of rather forbidding, dark-panelled rooms at the top of a series of staircases in a municipal building: the first, marble; the second, stone; the third a humble, unvarnished wood. A........

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