My earliest reading memory
I read The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien at seven, in my bedroom in the deep west of Cornwall. I secretly believed that Rivendell was based on that house, which it clearly wasn’t.
My favourite book growing up
Impossible. I’m inconstant, so it was whatever I was reading at the time. Let’s say Finn Family Moomintroll, which is the most perfect of Tove Jansson’s lovely (and occasionally frankly terrifying) Moomin books.
The book that changed me as a teenager
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, at 14. I loathed it. It nearly turned me off reading for ever. Everyone kept telling me it was a masterpiece and I just couldn’t understand why [school would] set a book about being an alienated child for a bunch of teenagers. “Yes, I know adults are incomprehensible and other people make no sense and loneliness is awful. Why do I need to read about it?”
The writer who changed my mind
Tan Twan Eng. The Garden of Evening Mists is a stunning novel – jaw-dropping, beautiful, intricate, elegant, powerful, touching – and made me see how books about terrible things can be uplifting to the point of transcendent. As I type that it seems obvious, but it wasn’t obvious to me then.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Ah. That one’s a little bit tricky, because I’ve always been immersed in writing. I can tell you that Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is so good that it infuriated me into starting a new novel, and that everything I’ve read by Michael Chabon has filled me with a furious creative envy that makes me work harder. Jeanette Winterson is some kind of perfect dreamer; Anne Carson and Colson Whitehead always make me feel like I should be wilder, wiser and better. But perhaps the honour has to go to A Murder of Quality by John le Carré. My father gave me a leather-bound copy when I was very young, and the smell of the pages and the beauty of the object itself made me believe in the magic of words.
The book I came back to
We’re back with Great Expectations. It really is a brilliant book, but we shouldn’t force it on teenagers. That’s not to say they shouldn’t read it if they want to. But just because it’s about young people doesn’t mean it’s written for them; it’s written for the rest of us remembering who we were.
The book I reread
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. I read it as a child and scared myself sleepless, then at university and chuckled at my tween fear, and again more recently, conscious at last not of the monstrosity of the hound, but the astounding cruelty of its master.
The book I could never read again
Almost every book I read for fun between seven and 17. I actually don’t remember what they were, so I can’t name and shame, but that is some kind of judgment in itself. To highlight instead some of the notable exceptions: Susan Cooper’s Dark Is Rising sequence, Patricia McKillip’s harpist trilogy, and all things William Gibson.
The book I discovered later in life
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.
The book I am currently reading
Matt Wixey’s Basilisk. And, with my kids, I’m reading the latest Amari Peters book, Amari and the Despicable Wonders by BB Alston. It’s very tense and I don’t know how she can possibly win through!
My comfort read
Spook Country by William Gibson, who I mentioned earlier, of course, but this is one of his later books and for me it’s just superb. The audiobook, read by Robertson Dean, is also a gem. The texture of the prose, the encounter between mundane and strange, the magic of story … it’s a good place to spend an evening.