Minutes before the start she was trying to get noticed in a bar, fearing she might faint from hunger. On stage she was at ease, as if still chatting amongst friends - like the readers who spotted her and offered their tapas. For a woman who appreciates, even craves, silence in this “too noisy” world, Tracy Chevalier can talk.

A Vermeer painting, an exhibition of quilts, Blake’s Songs Of Innocence And Experience, a fossil hunt in Dorset and the Bench by the Road Project which pays tribute to slaves escaping to freedom; the range of topics she shared reflected disparate sources of inspiration which have spawned novels – and new hobbies.

The Last Runaway is the first novel she’s set in her native America; in the book she transports her memory of rich sensual encounters when she arrived here – smelling coal and creosote, hearing unfamiliar birdsong and noticing the shape of oak leaves – to Honor Bright who travels to Oberlin (where there is now a bench by the road) to stay with a Quaker family helping runaway slaves, and tastes corn for the first time.

A crowd bought her book at full price, a gesture which speaks loudly for Chevalier’s storytelling.