Books that Built Me

MY mother started me reading early and may have shaped my later choices in life by introducing me to the works of Captain WE Johns, starting with Biggles of 266 Squadron.

I loved reading and worked out early on that what I wanted to be in life was: (a) a fighter pilot, (b) a writer, or (ideally) (c) a fighter pilot who wrote books.

At school I discovered that maths and science were about as decipherable to me as German codes without an Enigma machine, so I would never be a pilot.

When I quit my day job in PR to write, I was confronted with an alarming reality: I couldn’t think of a plot, or characters, to save my life. I later found inspiration in South Africa, and its neighbouring countries, which I had discovered as a tourist in 1995 on what was supposed to be a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

I found a battered copy of an old paperback my mum had told me to read years before, Hold My Hand I’m Dying by John Gordon Davis. It was a gut-wrenching, pageturning epic set during the bush war in the former Rhodesia. I loved it, and could now relate to the places he wrote about. My wife, Nicola, and I bought an old Land Rover in 1998 and decided on our third visit to take four months to explore southern Africa.

Cue my mother-in-law, an aspiring novelist like me, who bought me a copy of Stephen King’s how-to book, On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft. It changed my life. Here was a wildly successful author who said that it was OK not to have a plot and to not know who your characters were when you started writing.

On that four-month safari I took out my laptop one day, sat outside my tent, and started a story about a bunch of wild young things on an overland trip around southern Africa. I had no idea where they would end up or what would happen, but, eventually, I had a book. It was published as Far Horizon.

Thanks, mum, mum-in-law. Thanks, Biggles.

Tony Park’s latest novel, ‘An Empty Coast’, is set in Namibia (Pan Macmillan, R285)