What author have you discovered and loved recently?

Emily St John Mandel is my recent discovery. I read one of her earlier novels The Singer’s Gun, a thriller about a man who cannot escape his past, but her new one STATION ELEVEN is a tour de force. Shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2014, it also made a host of Top 10 lists.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world in which 99% of the population is dead from a virus called the Georgia Flu, it moves back and forth in time, telling the stories of various characters before and after the pandemic. It is a novel about friendship, memory, love, celebrity and our obsession with new technology.

Is there an author who is your guilty pleasure (or any book you’d rather have a brown paper bag over while reading?)

Reading itself is my guilty pleasure. I’m so bound up in my own writing and research, I feel very decadent when I have time to sit down and read for pleasure. I tend to choose books very different from my own – enjoying writers like David Nichol, Nick Hornby and John Irving.

What’s the book you’d choose as your Desert Island book?

Is it cheating to choose a ‘complete works of’? If not, I choose Charlies Dickens. I could happily read and reread his novels for their humour, satire, humanity and observations on Victorian society. But if I had to choose a single book to read and reread it would probably be A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY, or THE CIDER HOUSE RULES by John Irving, my favourite living writer.

Is there a book that you lend out and push onto all your friends?

The book I’ve pushed hardest over the past few years is BILLY LYNN’S LONG HALFTIME WALK by Ben Fountain. This biting satire about the Iraq War is the story of a celebrated US military platoon, Bravo Squad, who are taken on a ‘victory’ tour’ around the US, which culminates in a half time appearance at a football game. Amid all the cheers and patriotic fervour, only the soldiers realise that come tomorrow they’re being shipped off to war again.

Can books change lives? If so, which one changed yours?

There are books that can change a life. Others we read, but don’t inhale, forgetting them almost as soon as we close the last page. I have no great illusions about my own writings. I hope they entertain and bring enjoyment and occasionally make readers think.

The book that changed my life was my first novel, THE SUSPECT. It was sold on a part-manuscript of only 117 pages at the London Book Fair in 2002, where it triggered a bidding war. I was living back in Australia by then and the phone began ringing at three in the morning with my agent saying, ‘There are five US publishers bidding, and four German publishers….etc…etc…) Within the space of three hours every dream I had ever had of being a fulltime novelist came true.

It literally changed my life.

What are your top ten books?

In no particular order:

  • THE GREAT GATSBY by F Scott Fitzgerald
  • A MOVEABLE FEAST by Earnest Hemingway
  • MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN by Salman Rushdie
  • THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck
  • THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy
  • A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY by John Irving
  • THE CIDER HOUSE RULES by John Irving
  • THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP by John Irving
  • LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • THE ILLUSTRATED MAN by Ray Bradbury

What’s your most treasured book on your bookcase?

My most treasured book is a battered copy of LORD OF THE RINGS. When I was about 13, I borrowed this particular book from my high school library so often that the librarian, Mrs Fitzpatrick, forbade me ever taking it out again. So I took hiding the book in the library – putting in on a shelf where I figured nobody would go looking (ie, the physics and chemistry section). Like any good librarian, Mrs Fitzpatrick could sniff out a book in the wrong place. But instead of punishing me, she gave me the book. It is battered, broken and held together with tape, but my copy of LORD OF THE RINGS is the first book that I ever felt that I ‘earned’.