WHAT BOOK..?

… are you reading now?

I’M READING a proof of poet Lemn Sissay’s memoir, My Name Is Why, which is out in August. It’s structured around the reports made on him by Social Services during his years in foster care.

It tells the story of his 34-year campaign to get his records from Wigan Council and the harrowing tale of what he calls the theft of him at three-and-a-half years old from his mother. He writes this on page 14: ‘My story begins without her or any knowledge of her.

It goes without saying that it’s hard reading, but it’s also funny and wry, like the man himself and (although I haven’t got to the end yet) I know there’s a sort of peace he finds when he returns to Ethiopia and finds his family.

… would you take to a desert island?

WELL, it’s got to be long and it’s got to be deep and it’s got to be life-affirming in some way. The obvious choices (The Bible and Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time) are too, well, obvious so I’m going to go with the Complete Works (cheating, I know), of Arnold Bennett.

I’ve read almost everything he wrote — Anna Of The Five Towns, The Old Wives’ Tale, The Grand Babylon Hotel — and loved them all. He writes women particularly well, and he writes about small towns with small domestic dramas that nevertheless cut deep or make fortunes, things that change the course of a life.

I also like the fact that he was an outsider, despised by the Bloomsbury Set, but worked very hard at the craft and gave money to struggling writers. He also wrote a book called How To Live On 24 Hours A Day. Exactly what we need now.

… first gave you the reading bug?

IT WAS Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola. I bought the book with no expectations, having never read Zola nor heard of him; the book was a recommendation.

It starts innocently enough and then turns into a brilliant crime thriller. It’s about adultery, murder and the consequences of keeping a terrible secret. Despite being published in 1868, it’s very modern in its approach (it was vilified by the Press at the time because it was sympathetic to the adulterers and pretty gruesome on the murder itself) and doesn’t read like a dusty classic.

I went on to read several of Zola’s other books and plays, but this one was first and for me, the best.

… left you cold?

LORD Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien. I don’t really have a feel for fantasy (if that’s the genre) and only read the book because I thought I should. I have never really liked fairy tales, science fiction or anything that depends on the suspension of disbelief, or a belief in fairies or the afterlife or other worlds. I’m a ‘here and now’ person, believing that this is all there is, no hell, no heaven.

BECOMING DINAH (Orion £7.99, 240 pp) is Kit de Waal’s debut YA novel, the first in the Hachette Bellatrix collection