AMINATTA FORNA

Novelist

. ..are you reading now?

I LOVE essays. I’m re-reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which has new resonance in current times.

...would you take to a desert island?

WHEN I moved from England to the U.S. last year, I had to choose the books I truly couldn’t live without. Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient was one of them.

. ..first gave you the reading bug?

JACK LONDON’S White Fang, which I read in the West African heat and shivered like the men in his snowbound landscapes. London was a master of description.

. ..left you cold?

THOMAS HARDY’S Jude The Obscure. Hardy heaps such misery upon his protagonist that reading it turned into an endurance test. Happinessby aminatta Forna is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99