Gill Hornby
The bestselling author suggests key novels to help you through the trickier times in life.
AT MORNING break on my first day of school, I was accorded a special privilege: my big brother was allowed to come into the classroom and drink his milk with me.
Oh, the relief, to have this heroic, tall (about 3ft nothing, strung like a bean) ambassador from the distant land of home sitting beside me.
We blew bubbles down our straws in happy companionship, and at that moment a fundamental truth was revealed: having a big brother is one of the blessings of my life.
Not for everyone, of course. Take Sherlock Holmes. I bet Mycroft never drank warm milk with him. And the elder Holmes is generally thought to be the cleverer one.
I love having a cleverer older brother, but for Sherlock, it rankles. Mycroft’s powers of deduction are superior, but he’s lazy and can never quite be bothered with proper detective work. That doesn’t stop him getting in Sherlock’s way. Their psychological wrestling is an amusing and recurrent theme throughout Conan Doyle’s stories.
The Body, Stephen King’s coming-ofage novella on which the movie Stand By Me is based, is the story of a sorry collection of teenage boys. It’s 1960 in Maine; a local lad has gone missing and the gang wants to find his corpse — then be famous for doing so.
They’re from dysfunctional homes, two of them bedevilled by violent older brothers. The most cursed is Geordie, the narrator: can he ever escape from his brother’s shadow, now that brother is dead?
J. D. Salinger’s Glass family — who come up throughout his short stories — are my favourite fictional clan. I call in on them often. All seven children are precocious and have their own radio show — a sort of Brain Trust — in Thirties New York. Seymour is the genius and everyone’s hero.
In Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters, he is an extraordinary bridegroom; in A Perfect Day For Bananafish, he breaks his wife’s — and the reader’s — heart. Seymour is the epitome of the brilliant big brother.
Almost as good as my own.