The inspirations behind my Booker-shortlisted book

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.

The book I return to time and time again

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. I love the way Butler creates the history of the family seemingly without effort and I love the humour.

The book I can’t get out of my head

There are too many to single out just one.

The book that changed the way I think about the world

Chester Himes’s novel Third Generation made me consider the politics of skin colour. I could see my own mother in the mother of the character and so formed a better understanding of people in general. 

The book that changed the way I think about the novel 

Sterne’s Tristram Shandy taught me the importance of play as an avenue to meaning. Also, I learned that important truths don’t need and often don’t come italicised or with brassy accompaniment.

The book that impressed me the most 

Again, Tristram Shandy, for its intelligence and play.  It challenges how a work of fiction is supposed to mean and make meaning.  An 18^th-century novel that could pass for post-modern (if there were such a thing). 

 
The book I’m reading at the moment 

Joseph Horowitz’s Dvořák’s Prophecy.  This is a wonderful book about the construction of so-called high and low culture in turn-of-the-20th-century United States. 

 
The Booker-nominated book everyone should read 

J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.