The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is one of the country's best-known novelists.

Author of I'm the King of the Castle, Strange Meeting and The Woman in Black, among many other books, Susan Hill will be talking to Sue Lawley about the inspiration for her recent and highly-acclaimed sequel to Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca; about the loneliness which characterised her childhood and about the relationship between tragedy in her own life and the way she writes about it in her novels.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Tom Bowling by Benjamin Britten