THE BOOKS THAT MADE ME

Growing up, most of the books in our house were bibles or Baptist tracts. My older brother had a few well-thumbed paperbacks about the strange and bizarre, so I became quite the expert on the Loch Ness monster and spontaneous combustion.

I was a voracious reader, consuming all the fiction in my primary school library, much to the irritation of the headteacher. I bought books from jumble sales (a hardback set of Ruby Ferguson’s pony novels being my greatest coup) and borrowed from the library van that stopped on the village green. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott was my comfort read. I cried each time Amy burnt Jo’s manuscript and when Jo cut off her hair.

In my teens, I took guidance from school librarians. I became obsessed with One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My grandfather had been held in a prisoner of war camp and for a while, the only fiction I wanted to read related to internment.

Any recommendation by a teacher would set me off; that’s how I discovered Fay Weldon, Barbara Pym, and Alice Thomas Ellis. It’s quite possible that I decided to apply for Oxford after reading Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack – I’d never read anything so witty, sexy, and clever. Before my interview, I crammed up on novels set in Oxford; Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Jill by Philip Larkin, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It was my way of understanding the place better.

I’ve always been drawn to novels where setting is dominant rather than incidental; I like to feel the environment working on me as it does the characters. I discovered E.M. Forster at eighteen, thanks to Merchant Ivory, and one of my favourite novels is still A Room With a View with it’s seductive descriptions of Santa Croce and hillside Florence. I used to identify with Lucy Honeychurch – now I’m more of a Miss Bartlett.

When my children were small, I read The Road by Cormac Macarthy. Its tale of tenderness amidst a ravaged post-apocalyptic landscape shook me to the core. It is the only book I have ever completed and immediately begun reading again.

My bookcases are creaking with stories of women battling against harsh environments such as Under A Pole Star by Stef Penney, and The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier. I particularly admire Ann Weisgarber, whose work features isolated frontier settings. After finishing The Promise, about a woman who travels a thousand miles to her new husband’s farm in Texas, only to face the worst storm in living history, I remember thinking, THIS is the sort of novel I want to write.

I work part-time in a bookshop, and the three novels I most often recommend are linked by a common theme; women entrapped by male violence. They are: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker, and The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell. I recently added Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh to the list. It’s a literary page-turner that conjures a chilling world in which reproductive rights are allocated by lottery.

Found family recurs in some of my happiest reading; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows (consumed in one sitting on a flight from Sydney to Singapore), Crooked Heart by Lissa Evans, and Still Life by Sarah Winman. I’m also a Shakespeare nut, my favourite play being As You Like It which I have read, seen, and taught many times. It’s a joyful and sharply observant play in which city dwellers Celia and Rosalind escape in disguise to the forest, discovering different versions of family, liberty, and love along the way.

I admire historical novels with a twist. Those with bold and original voices; The Long Song by Andrea Levy, Days Without End by Sebastian Barry, and Washington Black by Esri Edugyan. And those with clever structures like The Night Shift by Sarah Waters, Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, and the genre-busting Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell which offers a dazzling array of inter-connected stories and narrative styles.

In discussing ‘the books that made me’ it would be disingenuous not to give the final mention to Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes. In my forties, I ran a poetry gift business, writing thousands of poems for special occasions. It began with my wedding speech, which I wrote in the style of a revolting rhyme. Rhyming couplets paid the bills for ten years and gave me the confidence and means to write my first novel at fifty. For that I am very grateful.

Joanna Miller, Author of The Eights
Fiction Book of the Month for April