Sarah Moss

And he said, no, you'd end up with only the ones that you really need.

And my thoughts about what they were, I'm slightly ashamed to say, is absolutely the canon.

It's the canon I grew up with and that I met at university and that I kind of carry in my mind.

It would be 19th century fiction.

It would be John Donne.

It would be Herrick.

It would be 16th, 17th, 18th century poetry.

Really a pretty traditional collection.

But that's what I learned.

That's what nurtured me as I was learning to read and write.

And I teach a much more diverse and contemporary range of books.

But fundamentally, I think I was shaped by those ones.

Washburn which came out this year um which I really liked it's quite experimental there's a sort of fantasy element which is usually not my thing at all normally as soon as it's altered reality I give up but I really liked it here it worked very well um he's a Hawaiian writer and it's set in Hawaii it was the first book I'd ever read from and about Hawaii and I thought it was so good on

The experience of coming to America and ambivalence about coming to America and a return and all the way through I was wanting these Hawaiian kids to do one of the things it looks as if they might do, excel at university and go on into brilliant professional careers.

But as I read, I understood why that might not always be the best thing to do and I realised that my own rather bourgeois sensibility was shaping the way I was reading it and learnt from it, not to do that so much.

Yes, absolutely.

And not romantically.

Whiters and Lovers by Lily King, which is very different, but similar in that I wasn't really sure I would like it and I picked it up because it was there.

And there were bits in that now that I keep quoting to my children.

In some ways, it's quite an obvious kind of book for me to recommend.