She is fond, in interviews, of stressing the importance of stories and of the need for beginnings, middles and ends. Listen to the record, moreover, and you will quickly sense the autobiographical mood. Gray writes movingly about the knocks of life and love – her life and her loves (She would prefer you not to take track eight too literally It is called “I’ve committed murder”. It is not a confession.)”You have to write what you know,” Gray told the San Diego Tribune earlier this year. “And the only thing I knew to write about was what I’d been through It was about relating stuff that happened to me. It was only after I wrote “Still” – and people listened to it and told me what it meant to them – that I realised it was pretty deep.

When people focus on my lyrics, who I am comes across.”When you know that, you understand that Gray has not always occupied the happy place in which she finds herself this morning Her lyrics can be sad and even downright depressing. “Still”, one of two songs dealing with abusive relationships, begins: “In my last years with him there were bruises on my face/ In my dawn and new day/ I finally got away/ But my head’s all messed up and he knows just what to say/No more dawn and new days/ I’m goin’ back to stay.” Another track, “Sex-o-Matic Venus Freak”, deals graphically with sex addiction.When Gray returned to New York last month to play before a capacity crowd in the Roseland Ballroom – not on an island, but in the middle of the harbour this time – she built the excitement relentlessly, even throwing in some Bob Marley songs, until her closing number, “I Try” When she left the stage, the crowd roared. But Gray never came back for an encore – not out of caprice, I am assured, but because the Roseland is a union venue and she had already run over. The crowd was left in suspense, screaming for more.Well, more is coming. Macy Gray, who is contracted to do three more albums for Epic, is only just getting started.. When you hear that a novel has been written by a poet, what are your expectations? A dreamy tale shimmering with lyrical intensity? That unmistakable poet-ness of Jackie Kay, Adam Thorpe.

John Burnside or Michael Ondaatje…? If you then discover that the novel’s title is a phrase borrowed from the Metaphysical poet, George Herbert? Yes, we must definitely be talking highbrow and hardback. When you hear that a novel has been written by a poet, what are your expectations? A dreamy tale shimmering with lyrical intensity? That unmistakable poet-ness of Jackie Kay, Adam Thorpe. John Burnside or Michael Ondaatje…? If you then discover that the novel’s title is a phrase borrowed from the Metaphysical poet, George Herbert? Yes, we must definitely be talking highbrow and hardback.
But Cordial and Corrosive (Arrow, £5.99), the new novel by Sophie Hannah, is a squat mass-market paperback in brash primary colours. It sits in a publisher’s catalogue alongside The Wedding Dress Diet (“don’t even think of getting married without it”) and Daily Meditations for Women Who Love Too Much. Is this really what the brightest young star in British poetry intended when she made the shift from verse to prose? Absolutely.”Take a book like Ben Okri’s The Famished Road – I just couldn’t write like that,” Sophie Hannah declares dryly. “It comes naturally to me to a) make a bit of sense b) begin the story and c) introduce a character…

I haven’t tried not to write ‘literary novels’: it’s just how they came out spontaneously,” she adds. “But you know how you read reviews that say ‘you can tell this novel was written by a poet’ I hope you can’t say that of mine. I don’t want readers to be held up by the writing, struggling through every beautiful sentence. I want to tell a good story; well written, but also accessible.”The slopes between upmarket and downmarket provide perilously little space for a serious writer to pitch camp, however.