The Booker-winning novelist on her teenage crush on Winston Graham’s character, the beauty of CS Lewis and how Hermann Hesse changed her life
My earliest reading memory
Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian. This book will always stay with me; it was perhaps the first one I read on my own that disturbed me, and presented me with a world in which there was pain, neglect and suffering, and also towering kindness. The older I get the more grateful I am to my parents for filling my early life with books – for the joy of them, and also an understanding that life is out there.
The book that changed me as a teenager
It’s weird how voraciously you read as a teenager and how books arrow into you. I remember reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse and there began my dabbling with ideas of Buddhism and taking myself off to silent retreats; it also seeded my decision to study philosophy, and got me interested in ideas-led fiction. So, life-changing in some ways. (Thank you, Hermann Hesse.)
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