Where’s your bookcase located and what does it look like?
Ever since I moved to Dublin four years ago I’ve lived in a TINY shoebox, so my bookcase is really a collection of places I’ve managed to stuff a few books (under the TV, on top of the wardrobes, etc.). I have two, small actual bookcases: the one next to my desk where I keep copies of my own books to remind myself, during the first draft process, that I’ve done this before and can do it again (!), and this one (pictured). This is in the living room and in my line-of-sight all day so I try to keep it neat. It’s quite representative of my tastes in books as a whole: crime/thrillers, true crime, NASA/Apollo mission and Paris! Note: 4 different editions of Jurassic Park, including a first (my prized possession) and my 1993 movie tie-in paperback edition that’s only held together these days by Sellotape and hope. The ‘CRH’ on top are notebooks, a gift from my writing buddy Carmel.
What kind of books will definitely not be found in your bookcase?
I don’t really read fantasy or sci-fi. Or poetry. Although technically there’s a few poetry books on my shelves but they’re hangovers from my English Lit degree that I keep around for showing off purposes. Ahem.
What author have you discovered and loved recently?
I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t read Mick Herron before now, and only picked up his novel This is What Happened because Jane Casey recommended it to me. And it was such a great read. Dark and tense but with some humour too. Effortlessly brilliant.
Where is your favourite place to read?
If I can have anywhere in the world, it’d be on the beach in Nice, France, in the off-season when it’s cooler and quieter. I go there as often as I can and my favourite thing to do is to just sit on the pebbles down by the water’s edge and read a book.
Can books change lives? If so, which one changed yours?
Absolutely! I think I’m a writer because of – bear with me here – Jurassic Park. I read it when I was 11, the summer the movie came out (although 11-year-old me skipped all the bits about DNA and chaos theory) and I just couldn’t believe that such a fantastic idea had come from nothing, that a man had sat down at his desk and made it all up. If that was a job, I wanted to have it. (Although, a couple of years later, I read The Hot Zone by Richard Preston and decided that I simply HAD to become a Biosafety Level 4 virologist who specialised in the Ebola virus and worked at the Centres for Disease Control and, spoiler alert, I didn’t, so…)
What’s the book you’d choose as your Desert Island read?
One of the Russian doorsteps, Crime and Punishment maybe or War and Peace, because those are the only circumstances in which I’ll ever get around to reading them.
What book did you give last as a present and to whom?
I bought my brother a stunning Penguin USA hardback edition of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House with an introduction by Guillermo del Toro. We watched the Netflix adaptation together and now we can read the book together too because the company I ordered it from accidentally sent me 2 copies. Hooray!
What are you reading now?
I’ve just finished a proof of The Whisper Man by Alex North, out in June, which knocked my socks off and made me so grateful to live in an apartment block (let’s just say there’s a scene involving the letterbox in a front door that I’ll be having nightmares about for years to come), and I’m about to start Tana French’s The Wych Elm. I handed in a draft of my next book last week so I’ve been saving these to binge-read now.
What are your top ten books?
What a difficult question! Of all time…? Yikes. Okay, here goes… (In no particular order):
- Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter
- Never Let Me Go by Kasuo Ishiguro
- The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
- Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
- Into the Darkest Corner by Elizabeth Haynes
- We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin
- A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly
- The Stand by Stephen King
- The Hot Zone by Richard Preston
What’s your most treasured book on your bookcase?
I can’t decide between these two: my first edition of Jurassic Park and a prize I won from Michael Connelly’s website a few years back: a signed, limited to 200, leather-bound, gold-edged, slip-cased edition of Nine Dragons that is personally inscribed to me. If there was a fire, I’d grab them before the fire extinguisher.
Thank you to Catherine for showing us around her bookshelf! The Liar’s Girl is out in paperback now. Order your copy here.