Pamela Dawes, the grad student who maintained the Lethe residences and served as their research assistant.

Pammie, though only Darlington called her that.

To be honest, with this novel, anyone other than Alex and Darlington could have been given more love! But I adored Pamela, perpetually on the edge of finishing her eternal dissertation. But with a steely edge to her too.

Miss Lucy was the most sporting of the guardians at Hailsham, though you might not have guessed it from her appearance. She had a squat, almost bulldoggy figure, and her odd black hair, when it grew, grew upwards so it never covered her ears or chunky neck.

I would love to read an adult’s depiction of life in Hailsham, the ethical, moral and humane conflict within their care for the clones destined to be donors. Miss Lucy ushers in those hints of the true situation, which we as the reader were hungry for, and offers what other guardians did not: honesty.

In my mind Raphael is better represented by a statue in an antechamber that lies between the forty-fifth and the sixty-second northern halls. This statue shows a figure walking forward, holding a lantern. It is hard to determine with any certainty the gender of the figure; it is androgynous in appearance. From the way she (or he) holds up the lantern and peers at whatever is ahead, one gets the sense of a huge darkness surrounding her; above all I get the sense that she is alone, perhaps by choice or perhaps because no one else was courageous enough to follow her into the darkness.

The sixteenth person of whom Piranesi has evidence of in his Halls. She is enigmatic and robust, brave and isolated and I would love to hear her story.

Briseis is barely even described in the Iliad – does she even speak? It’s been so long since I read it – but she is crucial to the plot. Enslaved by Achilles; taken by Agamemnon; the source of the conflict that takes Achilles from the war for Troy and nearly leads to a Greek defeat.

Thank you to Pat Barker for giving us your interpretation of her story and voice in The Silence of the Girls.

Besides the relationship between Victor and his creation – father, God, haunted, hunter – his relationship with Elizabeth is massively sidelined in the novel. Is this a reflection of Shelley’s society or a criticism of it?

Victor’s view that “All praises bestowed on her, I received as made to a possession of my own” is a terrifying admission and her silence in his story and narrative is a damning indictment of his personality.

Her relationship with Victor – adopted sister, fiance and (briefly) wife – is complex and dysfunctional. Barely do they get engaged and Victor flees her to go to University at Ingoldstadt and build himself a monster. If a man can go to such length to create life without a woman, what need does he have to get married, perhaps?

In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires.

These women were monstrous, sexual and sensual – a delightful foil to Lucy Westenra who was being courted by three men before being turned herself, and oh her death scene drips euphemism and masculine aggression! – and they stand out, for all that they appear in the novel for a handful of pages.

Many thanks to Kiran Millwood Hargrave for imagining their pre-vampiric lives in The Deathless Girls.

Jem gave a reasonable description of Boo: Boo was about six-and-a-half feet tall, judging from his tracks; he dined on raw squirrels and any cats he could catch, that’s why his hands were bloodstained—if you ate an animal raw, you could never wash the blood off. There was a long jagged scar that ran across his face; what teeth he had were yellow and rotten; his eyes popped, and he drooled most of the time.

Few characters are maligned quite as much as Boo Radley is here: the town bogey-man seen through the prism of cheap horror imagery and pop culture images of Frankenstein’s creature.

His innocence, naivety, childishness and massive vulnerability are perhaps summed up so beautifully in the only words he speaks “Will you take me home?” that to offer more might ruin him as a character.