Cassie McCullough

And I suppose the book I think that was the most influential book

for my first novel was a book called The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.

Won the Booker Prize in 97.

And again, I picked it up speculatively.

I wasn't really sure.

You know, I didn't even read the blurb.

I just dove straight into it.

And it is just such a gorgeous, beautiful, profound novel.

So expertly and exquisitely put together, there's the language behind

It was so inventive and so interesting and so lyrical and musical.

It was hugely influential to me in terms of how I structured Rhubarb particularly and how I played around with language in that novel.

That book meant a lot to me and still does.

This is good to hear.

I'm heartened to hear that.

Well, I suppose the obvious one, especially as we move towards me working on Jasper Jones, it would be remiss of me not to mention my affection for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, obviously.

It's a book I go back to almost annually, to be honest.

It's such a mainstay in how I think about literature, how I've assembled my own morality.

Um,

The extent to which I think books can be meaningful to our development because I read that book when I was a teenager and I consistently go back to it.

I continue as I mature to extract fresh wisdom out of it, I suppose, if that makes any sense.