For those of you who are not familiar with Anne's work, she is the author of Sugar and Snails, Underneath and Matilda Windsor is Coming Home. You can read my reviews of two of these titles by clicking on the title links.
She is also the author of a book of prize winning short stories, Becoming Someone.
Do hop over to her website where she is kindly offering a free e-copy of her other collection of short stories, Somebody's Daughter, to anyone who subscribes to her website Annethology
So, Anne, how do you think you would get on if you were stranded on a desert island?
I doubt I’d thrive on a desert island. Although I made a double bed years ago in woodwork class, I’m not very practical. I’d struggle to build a shelter and catch my own food. Plus, although content with my own company, solitary confinement could tip me over the edge. These eight books might prevent me going mad.
As a child, I loved the Just William books, although I was never as adventurous as the eponymous hero, who would probably have looked down on me as I wasn’t middle-class and I wasn’t a boy. Richmal Crompton’s series is far superior to the other classics of my 60's childhood – such as Enid Blyton’s Famous Five – because, through the humour, we can both identify with William and see the error of his ways.
With time to kill on my desert island, I’m sure I’d enjoy George Eliot’s Middlemarch much more than when I studied it for English A-level. I reckon I’m finally old enough to get the humour, the pathos and the politics, and to appreciate the patience of Mrs Blair, who had to teach it to a bunch of uncultured teens.
Another classic I’d like to take with me, which I read unprompted in my slightly younger teens, is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. I want this less for the story of the orphaned girl who won’t to be beaten than for reminders of the Peak District, where I lead a guided walk around the settings believed to have inspired the novel. (Yup, that’s Derbyshire, not Yorkshire, the better-known Brontë territory!)
I travelled a lot in my 20's, 30's and 40's; although my feet have now stopped itching, trapped on that island, I might get nostalgic for those times. I’ve chosen a non-fiction book, Third-Class Ticket by Heather Wood, as a reminder of the five months I spent on the Indian subcontinent, staying in rural villages as well as seeing the famous sites. This is a moving account of a journey made in 1969 by forty Bengalis who, being poor and uneducated, never expected to leave their village, and the Western woman who had the privilege of accompanying them for 15,000 kilometres over seven months.
My travels punctuated my career as a clinical psychologist in mental health services in the NHS. The book I’ve selected as a memento of that part of my life was actually published shortly after I had taken early retirement: The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz is a collection of psychoanalytic case studies that read like short stories. There’s so much wisdom in these pieces, I could reread them a thousand times and never get bored.
One novel that almost as illuminating and compassionate about how we humans delude ourselves is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. At the heart of the novel is a premise familiar from schmaltzy movies: Enid Lambert wants her three adult children to spend one last Christmas in the family home. Yet the reader soon gathers that Enid wants the impossible: the family she and her husband, Alfred, have fashioned is beyond repair. It’s the perfect antidote to loneliness in solitude: feeling lonely among our nearest and dearest is far worse.
Another novel I find particularly psychologically astute is Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, about a woman whose teenage son commits a terrible crime. To what extent is Eva culpable in how she’s raised him? How much are the family dynamics shaped by trans-generational trauma? One of the strengths of this novel is how, although (we think) we know the ending from the beginning, the tension is electric.
I wasn’t sure if I should ask for a bumper notebook for my final choice for all the masterpieces I’m bound to write on my island retreat. If that’s not allowed, or it’s already there, I’ll have another doorstopper novel: Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son. After nearly 600 pages in the Democratic Republic of North Korea, I’ll be grateful to be marooned far from cruel dictatorships or any human society at all. A love story, a thriller, a dystopian political satire, a heart-warming tale of the endurance of the human spirit or a trauma narrative; for me, it’s about the wasteland of a world where the individual is divorced from his/her own story and fiction is an instrument of control.
What a fantastic selection of books, and I would definitely take some of those along if I were stranded. Thank you Anne for sharing your choices and for being the first author to launch this series of blog posts.
If you are an author and would be interested in taking part then please let me know.
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