Andrew O'Hagan

So sometimes you sit down and write a book because you want to read it yourself.

Well, one of the things I always loved about the American writer Don DeLillo was that he did that very thing I've tried to describe of putting the whole culture into his books.

He wrote a book called Libra, which is essentially a kind of novelistic version of the Kennedy assassination.

Its central character is Lee Harvey Oswald.

Libra is a sort of masterpiece of modern writing because it takes the whole culture and goes underneath.

There's a sound of the musical landscape is in there, television newsreels, cinema.

mystery stories, the whole sort of beat of America at that time has been worked into that book.

And that's a real inspiration for me.

I could do it right off the top of my head and it would be Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, the great Scotsman.

And surprisingly, perhaps, a biography which I found on a shelf in a hairdresser's when my mother was having her hair done when I was a child.

And it was called Norma Jean by Fred Lawrence Skiles.

It was a biography of Marilyn Monroe.

And I came across it, as I say, by accident.

And

I'm the kind of guy who reads biographies the way some people read thrillers.

I just love reading about lives rather than plots.

I'm not a very plotty writer myself.

I'm much more caught up with what happens in a family or what happens in one person's life.

And they're the kind of stories that I think really connect to people's hearts in the end.