Where’s your bookcase located and what does it look like?
It’s in what I call my shed – in reality a log cabin at the bottom of the garden of our terraced house in Twickenham where I do a lot of my writing and internet-based research. I’m lucky enough to have another writing base, a caravan on the Isle of Wight bought with the advance for my debut Stasi Child, so if it’s not working in one location I can switch to the other. A change of scenery works wonders for writer’s block! The bookshelf is actually a number of pine shelves I got from a DIY store last year (and put up myself, so they’re probably not straight). The shed used to be my music practise room when I was in a band, and the top shelf is cluttered with music and recording paraphernalia. Out of shot – underneath the bookcase – is a collection of six guitars, including two electric 12-strings. Sadly, these days they don’t get played. When I decided to dedicate myself to trying to write a novel and joined the City University London Crime Thriller MA in October 2012, I gave up songwriting and the band.
What kind of books will definitely not be found in your bookcase?
Women’s fiction and romance, although I have been known to enjoy the occasional Jilly Cooper – and our cats (now very much deceased) were named after two characters in one of her books. In fact, there’s a horrible preponderance of male authors on my bookshelf. It may be inbuilt sexism, but I suspect it’s more that male writers are more drawn to writing the sort of books I like. Cold War or communist-based thrillers, historical war thrillers, that sort of thing. I have a suspicion (based on no empirical evidence whatsoever) that male readers read more male authors, although as a teenager I was a huge Helen MacInnes fan – reading all of her new ones as soon as they came out. I deliberately made both protagonists in my dual narrative novel female, to try to draw in more of a female readership to what might otherwise be seen as a ‘male’ book with its Cold War setting.
What author have you discovered and loved recently?
One of my favourites over the last year or so was Gilly Macmillan’s Burnt Paper Sky. Normally I shy away from books set in locations I know well, as part of the fun of reading for me is finding about places I know little about or time periods I never experienced. But this was set in Bristol – where I studied at both the university and polytechnic in the late 1970s – and that brought back good memories. It’s a cracking read too.
Where is your favourite place to read?
Lying on a beach. I don’t read nearly as much as I should, and tend to get through most of my reading – if it’s not directly for research – when on holiday.
Can books change lives? If so, which one changed yours?
Yes, in good and bad ways. You could – I guess – trace my successful publication back as far as the early noughties, when I read Grasshopper by Barbara Vine. I’ve read and enjoyed several books by Ruth Rendell, both under her own name and the Vine pseudonym. But I thought this one was awful, and although I’d never attempted writing my own novel up to that point, it prompted me to have a go and try to do better. That manuscript got rejected everywhere it was sent, so eventually I self-published. I sold out the print run, but found it all too time-consuming when trying to hold down a stressful day job. But the second (unpublished) novel of what I hoped would be a series was the writing sample that earned my place on a creative writing MA, and it was winning the course prize there for Stasi Child that earned me an agent. So, in a very indirect way, Grasshopper by Barbara Vine changed my life!
What’s the book you’d choose as your Desert Island read?
Probably my favourite book of recent years, Alone in Berlin (or Every Man Dies Alone) by Hans Fallada, first published in German in 1947 and in English in 2009. Utterly depressing but also utterly gripping.
What book did you give last as a present and to whom?
I’m ashamed to say it was a signed copy of Stasi Child, to an 87-year-old woman from Montrose who wrote me a delightful, four-page handwritten letter about how much she’d loved the book. I thought she could give her original copy to a friend.
What are you reading now?
I’m flip flopping between a proof of William Ryan’s new standalone, The Constant Soldier, and one of the latest e-books from my own publishers, Twenty 7 – Tall Oaks, by Chris Whitaker. Very different books, but I’m enjoying both immensely.
What are your top ten books?
- Alone in Berlin (as above), Hans Fallada
- The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell
- Pure, Andrew Miller
- The Iron Curtain Kid, Oliver Fritz
- The Devil in the Marshalsea, Antonia Hodgson
- Fatherland, Robert Harris
- The Damned United, David Peace
- The Crimson Petal and the White, Michel Faber
- The Valley of Unknowing, Philip Sington
- Winos, Rhinos and Lunatics, Deke Leonard
I’m glad I’ve managed to get one woman in there. I thought Devil in the Marshalsea was wonderful. I’m also pleased to feature one of my guitar heroes, Deke Leonard. At school, I was a huge fan of Man (Deke pops up in my favourite line-ups), Neil Young and Kevin Coyne. I’ve also deliberately put a self-published book in there. The Iron Curtain Kid is a fantastic history/memoir of East Germany written by the German author straight into English. Thoroughly recommended for anyone interested in life in the former GDR.
What’s your most treasured book on your bookcase?
It’s a signed first edition of Mr Emmanuel, by Louis Golding (next to the copy of Gorky Park in the photo) given to me by the lady from Montrose mentioned above in response to my sending her a signed copy of Stasi Child. Golding signed it and gave it to her in 1945, so just after WW2 ended (it was published in 1939). It was her most treasured book, and she gave it to me as a thank-you for Stasi Child. You can’t do much better than that, so ‘treasured’ it most certainly is.