WHAT BOOK?

... are you reading now?

PEARL by Sian Hughes. Every sentence rings with bell-like clarity in content, meaning, effect and shape. When Marianne, the narrator, is eight, her mother walks out on the family and disappears. The book tracks the long shadows that this casts. It’s devastating, pitch-perfectly written, and so very English in its setting, landscape, unshowy, unmelodramatic soul, quiet — and sometimes turbulent — resilience. It feels like a whole life has been poured out onto the pages by a master.

... would you take to a desert island?

TWO books, if I may: George Eliot’s Middlemarch and The Gate Of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald.

Middlemarch is what I call a ‘life book’, one you keep revisiting and finding it a different book to the one you read before. When I first read it, it was Dorothea’s story about whether she would be able to liberate herself of the lid that her husband Casaubon has put so firmly on her life. Later, it becomes Lydgate’s tragedy. Then, one day, you think none of the characters is as important as the narrator.

The plenitude of The Gate Of Angels works in a different way. Fitzgerald is writing about what I call the ‘invisible surplus’, the notperceived-by-the-senses, the unspeakable, to provide the novel’s armature and its metaphorical underpinnings. It’s her quantum physics novel about love, the irrational or the suprarational. How did she make it all fit so perfectly, while maintaining the integrity and irreducibility of that which cannot be said? You could spend all your time in the desert island trying to work it out.

... first gave you the reading bug?

THE renditions of Greek myths by the astonishing Bengali children’s writer Sukumar Ray. I am touched by wonder anew when I think back to the time I first encountered Hercules putting on the shirt, dipped in the poisonous blood of the Lernaean Hydra, given to him by his wife, Deianira.

... left you cold?

OH DEAR, this list is very long, I’m afraid, and keeps getting longer apace. I find Orhan Pamuk unreadable. Ditto Sebastian Barry. While acknowledging that Bleak House is an unrivalled masterpiece, a lot of Dickens reminds me of what Wilde said about The Old Curiosity Shop: ‘One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.’ n CHOICE by Neel Mukherjee (Atlantic £18.99) is out on April 4.