DESERT ISLAND BOOKS
20 top authors on the must-reads they couldn’t live without
RODDY WOOMBLE
Latest Book: Instrumentals
Desert Island Book: The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa Contained within this book is everything you need to cope with being a human being on planet earth. It’s in turns depressing, hilarious, enlightening, prophetic, wise, troubled, but most of all truthful. I came across it as a 23-year-old in a second hand bookshop in Minneapolis when I was on tour with the band. It changed my view of books. I take a copy with me almost anywhere I go.
JOHN BYRNE
Latest book: Sitting Ducks Desert Island Book: Peter Hall – Diaries I have read and reread this book since it first came out, and look forward to re-reading it yet again in the near future (i.e. when I finish reading the second volume of James Lees-Milne’s Caves of Ice 1945-48). I have chosen Peter Hall’s Diaries as he gives the reader a blow-byblow account of how the National Theatre, housed initially in a series of Portakabins, came into being with its three theatres, the Olivier, Lyttelton, and Cottesloe, on the South Bank, with all the ups and downs encountered along the way (some of which were indeed hair-raising!) to become the great institution we know today – not only that, but alongside what was going on in his own personal life at the same time. Absolutely gripping!
CHIBUNDU ONUZO
Latest Book: Welcome to Lagos Desert Island Book: Middlemarch by George Eliot Middlemarch is long enough for me to spend many hours reading it and the different storylines mean that I don’t have to read the book in order. I can start from the middle or from the end. Wherever I begin, Dorothea Brooke getting married to Mr Casaubon will always be a disaster.
ABIR MUKHERJEE
Latest Book: A Rising Man Desert Island Book: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell While there are many books which have made a great impression on me, one stands out above all the others – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I’ve always been drawn to dystopian views of the future and this is, in my opinion, the finest dystopian novel. I’ve read this book more times than I can remember and it’s a joy every time. The characterization of Winston and Julia’s relationship, set against the backdrop of this all-powerful totalitarian society is just fantastic.
DENISE MINA
Latest Book: The Long Drop
Desert Island Book: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker The book is a history of violence. Pinker argues that violence has been decreasing throughout human history, even allowing for both World Wars and the Holocaust. It sounds dull, and it is in parts, but interspersed with that are small stories, elements of history, wars and world events I had never heard of. Essential in this day and age, it’s a very optimistic read. It shows how our awareness of the world around us magnifies perceptions of violence while interpersonal and international aggression is consistently declining. More importantly for a desert island, it is as fat as a door stop.
MIRANDA SAWYER
Latest Book: Out of Time Desert Island Book: American Tabloid by James Ellroy This is the first part of Ellroy’s Underworld USA trilogy. Ellroy adds fictional characters to real life events of the late 50s and early 60s, up until the assassination of JFK. It’s a thrilling, enthralling book, with three unlovely yet charismatic anti-heroes. Ellroy is brilliant at amoral masculinity and what that does to a man; his language is dazzling, his research impeccable. American Tabloid grabs you by the throat and the heart. I loved it when I read it, but I’d like to reread it now, as its examination of the FBI and sleaze in relation to a flawed president seems suddenly apt in 2017.
RICHARD COLES
Latest Book: Bringing in the Sheaves
Desert Island Book: Mapp and Lucia novels of EF Benson, bound in one volume if possible. They are, on the face of it, the lightest social comedies of leisured life in England in the 20s and 30s, but beneath the brilliant surface deep currents flow. They were written by one of the sons of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, a prelate whose home life, conventional in his case, most certainly was not in the case of his family, and I like to think that the contrast between outward orderliness and inner complexity is a constant theme.
VAL MCDERMID
Latest Book: Out of Bounds
Desert Island Book: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Even if I wasn’t in such an appropriate place, I’d still choose this. I first encountered it as a child and I was hooked. I got the book out of the library and fell in love with it. It is, I think, a masterclass in what a novel should be. Page-turning story, exotic and dramatic settings, memorable characterisation – who doesn’t know Long John Silver? – and prose that never disappoints. What’s not to love?
JOANNA TROLLOPE
Latest Book: City of Friends Desert Island Book: The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay The Towers of Trebizond has, as a novel, got it all. It has a love story at its heart, also wit and jokes, travel, history, religious and political debate, fantasy and dreams. It’s also written in the most beguiling style, sometimes lyrical, sometimes sharp and focused, always distinctive. It was Rose Macaulay’s last novel, and her best, the latter because she at last allowed some of her own life and emotions into her writing. The heroine, Laurie, isn’t Rose, but she shares Rose’s energetic life of the mind, as well as the agony and ecstasy of the love of her life being a forbidden one. Did it’s being forbidden, Rose wondered, give it its intensity?
IAN RANKIN
Latest Book: Rather Be the Devil Desert Island Book: Bleak House by Charles Dickens. A desert island book needs to be immersive and something you’d never tire of re-reading. Some of my favourite books are short – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Jekyll and Hyde spring to mind – but I could read each of them in a single day. So instead I’m opting for Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Teeming with characters and scenes, it is also deftly plotted and plunges the reader into English society from top to bottom, showing how the poorest and most wretched are not wholly disconnected from those with privilege. And it’s a murder mystery, one of the earliest and best.
CHRIS BROOKMYRE
Latest Book: Black Widow (pbk – March 9) / Want You Gone (hdbk – April 20) Desert Island Book: Espedair Street by Iain Banks It’s odd to think that if I was marooned on a desert island I would want my imagination to transport me to Paisley, but this is a book that gives me comfort, joy and inspiration. It is about where you call home, it is about creativity, friendship, loneliness and redemption, all told through the story of an ordinary character adrift in the extraordinary world of rock and roll. It is also the book that reminds me most of Iain as a person, as I think he channelled some of himself into the character of Weird: a creative individual with grand ambitions to match his talent, but his art hiding a shyness uncomfortable with fame.
SALLY MAGNUSSON
Latest Book: Where Memories Go Desert Island Book: Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens Dickens or Wodehouse? Oh, the indecision. It’s got to be a book for laughing out loud, for revelling in the sheer wondrousness of the prose, for puzzling blissfully over how the writer does it. So, Gussie Fink-Nottle at Market Snodbury Grammar or the Veneerings’ dinner party? Right Ho, Jeeves or Our Mutual Friend? For depth (not to mention width) it has to be Our Mutual Friend, Dickens’ last completed novel and my longtime favourite. Brilliant characterisations, sharp social observation, exuberant melodrama, big weaving metaphors and all the dark poetry of London and its river. Oh, and very, very funny.
FLORA SHEDDEN
Latest Book: Gatherings Desert Island Book: Love in a Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez I first read this book while on holiday in Spain. I was quite young at the time and knew very little about the turn of the century let alone the politics of South America. It felt like I was reading about an entirely different world, but one I fell in love with. Since then I have read a few of Marquez’s books and still enjoy his loving and caring portrayal of characters despite their mistakes, lies and liaisons. I would happily reread this book again and again on my desert island – the sunshine would help set the novel! I just hope I don’t need to rescue a parrot from a mango tree…
MATTHEW PARRIS
Latest Book: Scorn
Desert Island Book: The Bridge of San Luís Rey by Thornton Wilder This small but perfectly-formed novel is almost short enough to learn by heart. Wilder is a mid-20th-century American writer from whose slim output pours an aching love for, and despair about, human beings. His novel begins at its ending. Basing his tale on the true story of the snapping of a rope bridge in 18th-century Peru, Wilder takes the five random individuals catapulted to their deaths together, and traces the different lives of each until that fateful chance coming-together. Tony Blair quoted the book’s concluding paragraph in his address at the New York church service to commemorate the victims of the Twin Towers attack.
MALACHY TALLACK
Latest Book: The Undiscovered Islands Desert Island Book: Bob Dylan. The Lyrics: 1961 – 2012 Trapped on a desert island, it’s hard to say whether the absence of books or music would be more difficult to bear. So, forced to choose only one item, I might try to fill both absences at once. I know quite a number of Bob Dylan’s songs by heart anyway, but this book, his complete collected lyrics, would give me many more hours of pleasure – reading, learning and singing – and perhaps distract me from the horror of my abandonment. There is as much beauty, wit and brilliance in here as in any other book I know.
VINCE CABLE
Latest Book: After the Storm Desert Island Book: Conclave by Robert Harris I am publishing this year my first novel: a “political thriller”. I am an amateur and beginner. I turn for inspiration to the masters: Graham Greene, Le Carre and Robert Harris. Harris has a huge following on the back of his Roman trilogy and Fatherland and my favourite to date: his beautifully crafted history of the Dreyfuss trial, An Officer and a Spy. His latest book, Conclave, has familiar ingredients: a page-turning, pacy thriller underpinned by meticulous research and believable characters. A Papal Conclave is pretty remote from most of our experiences, and his, but he makes it come alive and totally believable: the piety, politics, ambition, intrigue and true humility. The reader is kept in suspense until the very end with a conclusion that is both shocking and inspiring. I loved it.
EMMA VIECELI
Latest Book: Back to the Future – Who is Marty McFly?
Desert Island Book: Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore Strangers in Paradise is everything I want from comics. It’s a story about real people in real situations ... most of the time. With a little craziness thrown in to keep things interesting, SiP largely sticks to what I love most in any medium of storytelling: the relationships between people. How they can change, evolve and fracture. Terry Moore’s gorgeous and clean black and white line-art conveys all the emotional beats of the story without distracting from the pace or storytelling. It’s a perfect example of how comic layouts, expression and pace can be used to totally draw you into the lives of the characters.
MADELEINE BUNTING
Latest Book: Love of Country Desert Island Book: Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels Very few books can ever be described as perfect but this is the closest I’ve ever read. I am fascinated by those books which balance precariously on the boundary between poetry and prose, and Michaels achieves this tightrope walk with breath-taking skill. At no point does the beauty of the language overload the exploration of plot. Set in the aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Poland, it is a book which reckons with Europe’s tragic 20th century – a subject which has always felt painfully close – while at the same time offering the inspiration of the resilience of the human spirit. On a desert island, it would inspire me, reminding me of the beauty of language while also bringing home the tragedy of history. That may not be cheery stuff, but it will make a desert island seem a comparatively comfortable fate!
VYBARR CREGAN-REID
Latest Book: Footnotes: how running makes us human
Desert Island Book: The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd No-one before or since has written about the experience of the outdoors with such understated eloquence as Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain. Simply put, the book is an account of walking the Cairngorms, but it’s much more than this. Sparks flow from her pen as she describes what happens in our bodies when we navigate and experience places old and new. At one point she tells us, “My eyes were in my feet”. When writing gets really good, adjectives for describing it start to become useless, but The Living Mountain really is that rarest of things: a masterpiece.
DAVID KEENAN
Latest Book: This is Memorial Device Desert Island Book: The Maximus Poems by Charles Olson This is a book you could spend a lifetime re-reading, decoding and reimagining. Olson’s central work, its great white pages with huddles of small black text resemble maritime maps or the movements of shipping across a great sea. His approach to Gloucester, his adopted home town, is as an island, and his depth of vision, his facility for seeing, clearly, what is in front of him, reveals the centre of the world as being exactly where you are stood. Poems of geology, of shipping lore, of personal reminiscence and of classical myth are rendered in rhythms and projections so deep-seated that time itself seems like something under his command.