The books that CHANGED MY LIFE

Maggie O’farrell Women’s Prize for Fiction winner Maggie O’farrell has a new book out this month called

The Marriage Portrait. Here, she shares the books that have made her laugh, cry and think…

THE LAST BOOK THAT

MADE ME LAUGH It was a rueful laugh, given out as I read Susanna Abse’s brilliant and touching Tell Me The Truth About Love, an account of her 30-odd years as a couples’ therapist.

Her clients’ travails and resentments, both minor and major, are so recognisable, and she meets each one with gentle insight and humour.

THE LAST BOOK THAT MADE ME CRY

Foster by

Claire Keegan is an exquisitely painful child’seye-view of a summer spent in the house of relatives, while her mother is having a baby. Keegan is mistress of the unsaid: in all the care and love lavished upon the narrator by her foster parents you can hear the neglect she has suffered at home. It is an extraordinary, affecting novel that I’m urging everyone I know to read.

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED THE WAY I THINK

Mary Oliver’s poetry is joyful and also perhaps instructive of a good way in which to live your life: with wonder and verve and a strong connection to the natural world.

THE BOOK THAT GOT ME THROUGH A DIFFICULT TIME

Giving Up The Ghost, Hilary Mantel’s memoir, is a book I return to again and again for its wisdom and elegance. I found enormous solace in it when I was going through health struggles. She writes with such measured and furious accuracy about those moments in life when your body does not behave as you and medical professionals might expect.

THE BOOK I MOST OFTEN GIVE TO OTHERS

It would have to be Where The Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. Every baby born to my friends and family receives a copy because it is, well, perfect.