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Author Lauren Oliver’s latest novel, Vanishing Girls, appears in bookstores in March

Lauren Oliver's internationally bestselling young-adult novels include Before I Fall, Panic – which has been optioned for film by Universal Studios – and the Delirium trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium and Requiem. The Brooklyn-based Oliver, whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages, is also the author of a pair of middle-grade novels, The Spindlers and Liesl & Po. Her latest novel, Vanishing Girls, about a young woman searching for her missing teen sister, arrives in bookstores this month.

Whose sentences are your favourite, and why?

I love the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez uses language and imagery. I have a habit of underlining sentences or metaphors that strike me as I read. The first time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was about 20 pages in when I realized I'd been underlining almost every single sentence – whole pages were underlined. There's a connectedness to his books, a way of circling back to information and images, that makes it impossible to disentangle his sentences and even his paragraphs into parts. And that, of course, then relates back to his themes about traits and habits that show up through generations and the circular cast of time. Very brilliant.

Which historical period do you wish you'd lived through, and why?

The problem with most historical periods is that for the vast majority of the population, things were absolutely terrible. Only a privileged few got to, for example, live in palaces and ride around in horse-drawn carriages between balls. Nonetheless, as a major, lifelong Jane Austen fan, I must confess that I find the late 18th century and early 19th century of special interest. I am, of course, assuming that, should I be whisked back in time, I would find myself immediately at Pemberley, where Darcy would confess his great love for me instantaneously.

What agreed-upon classic do you despise?

A deeply shameful secret of mine is that I have never managed to finish the book Lolita, despite repeated efforts to do so. I have no idea why. The premise is fascinating. Humbert Humbert must be one of the strangest and most ambitious protagonists ever created. And I love Nabokov's style, so it has nothing to do with the actual prose. But every time I pick the book up I stall about a quarter of the way in. Shameful!

Would you rather have the ability to be invisible or time-travel, and why?

Definitely time-travel. I'm extremely extroverted, and I'm not sure I have ever for a moment wished to be invisible. I mean, I guess it might help if I wanted to become a bank robber or something, but I tend to stay on the good side of the law anyway. Eavesdropping holds no appeal – who on Earth wants to know what people really think about them? But time-travel would be amazing. You could amass a fortune betting on futures; you could go back and give that snotty co-worker the brilliant riposte her passive-aggressive comment deserves. You could see dinosaurs. Not that you would necessarily want to…

What's your favourite word to use in a sentence, and why?

Oh, it changes. The weird thing is that from book to book, I seem to latch onto different images or metaphors and then horribly abuse them over the course of the novel. When I was writing Delirium, I was mysteriously obsessed with the word "spinning." Everything spun in that book. In a recent book of mine, I'd vastly overused the word "glitter." And somewhat recently I became obsessed with the words "torque" and "winch" – I am going to have to find different ways to winch those into my new draft.

What's a book every 10-year-old should read, and why?

Every 10-year-old should read or should have read Matilda. Roald Dahl was just a genius of children's literature, and Matilda embodies probably the psychological spirit of nearly every school-age child: Every child at least sometimes feels alone and misunderstood and mistreated by siblings and parents and teachers. Matilda is really about recasting what is freakish as what is brilliant and skillful. It's about the revenge of the wonderful and strange. She's an excellent role model for every child.

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