My earliest reading memoryWhen I was eight, my mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. My favourite book growing upThe Red Pony by John Steinbeck had a profound effect on me in secondary school. The book I could never read againJohn Fowles’s The Magus is so clever and engrossing, but it has one of the most frustrating endings I’ve encountered. It’s perhaps the only book I’ve ever loved so much that I had to throw it at the wall for disappointing me. A short novel from 1975 that unravels a character’s inherited trauma and depicts her haunted consciousness through time to devastating effect.

Source: The Guardian March 27, 2026 14:30 UTC