Christine Leunens

The author whose book Caging Skies inspired Jojo Rabbit, on fiction vs fact and Mister Pip.

My earliest reading memory

Having to read aloud a non-fiction hardback, Mississippi River, on the sofa by my mother – yet another big book with small print and long words for someone little like me. My mother found non-fiction more serious than fiction because what was inside was “real”. She’d get cross when I’d make a mess out of words, thinking I was doing it “on purpose” – as if I would’ve ever dared! Later in life, I learnt that her school in southern Italy had been turned into a German headquarters during World War II, and then taken over by American soldiers who used it as a military base, resulting in no schooling for the local children for years; alas, after the war, boys were favoured for formal education. My mother, I realised, had only wanted to immerse me in books after having been deprived of them herself.

The book I wish I’d written

I can never really wish I’d written someone else’s book, as my books are like my children to me. This said, I would readily adopt Lloyd Jones’ Mr Pip. I find it powerful how Jones depicts the Bougainville Civil War, juxtaposing its atrocities with the universal nature of children and passages on the profound ways a fictional story or character becomes an integral part of the reader. The zealous Christian character of Mathilda’s mother, Dolores, still comes to mind from time to time and some part of me will always ache at her loss.

My comfort read

My mental equivalent of stepping into an alternative world awash in colour is Alice in Wonderland, The Little Prince, a Tintin book, or some such with illustrations. Non-fiction, to do my mother justice, has a comforting quality of its own – reading about something real, a place, an event, a moment in time that someone has gone over, recorded features and figures of, put into words, tidied up on paper.

The book I'm reading right now

Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle, where parallel lives are drawn between a female pilot, born in 1914, and a Hollywood A-lister playing her in a motion picture 100 years later. Interestingly, halfway through the novel, I couldn’t resist looking up the historical character of the female pilot online, only to discover that she is entirely fictional. Wanting to know more about women aviators of this era, I’ve just added Fiona Kidman’s The Infinite Air to my reading stack. ▮

IN AMBER’S WAKE, Nelsonbased Leunens’ fourth novel, will be published by Bateman Books in February.