#THISBOOK

Zawe Ashton, Caitlin Moran and more on who taught them to love books

From lucky car boot finds to well-stocked libraries (and not forgetting dad), Grace Dent, Caitlin Moran, Zawe Ashton and more reflect on how they came to love reading.

How an English teacher hooked musician Sharleen Spiteri on reading

“To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee is a book that you’ll pass on to people and recommend. It’s a book that will inspire you to write songs. It’s a book that will help you sort out your life and it’s a book that will make you understand things that happen in your life.” 

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  It was a life-changing English teacher who hooked musician Sharleen Spiteri on Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

Spiteri was 12 and Miss Kennedy was “a bit of a hippy”, young, laid-back and phenomenally good at reading aloud.

“She expressed the excitement, the tension and the fear. You could smell the smells, feel the heat and imagine the kids running around, the freedom and also the suppression. It was my first romance with a book,” explains Spiteri. 

“She really changed my understanding of literature. She told us that just because you’re told it’s good or because somebody says it’s a classic, doesn’t mean you need to think that.”

As a musician, songwriter and lyricist, words are a huge part of Spiteri’s life.

“Literature and music are everything,” she says.

But for Spiteri this book is more powerful than any other due to her connection with Scout, the central character.

 “I wanted to be Scout in the book and was pretty obsessed with her because I was a real tomboy growing up. I wasn’t the cutest kid. I was a scrawny, skinny little tomboy– I got badly bullied at school.”

“My sister had the other side to Scout. I remember my sister literally getting a hat-pin and jabbing it in a girl’s ass when we were at school. She had the strength and feistiness that Scout has but I had her physical attributes. My sister was really cute and really pretty and I was the geeky one.”

“Scout is a real tomboy, but she’s always sticking up for her brother. She looks out for her family in the daytime, then at night she is more thoughtful, emotionally connecting with both things and people’s feelings.”

“It’s a book that you’ll pass on to people and recommend. It’s a book that will inspire you to write songs. It’s a book that will help you sort out your life and it’s a book that will make you understand things that happen in your life.” 

“I’m first generation Scottish and having a funny name meant getting called names, “Spit Spiteri. Iti…” this that and the next thing. The name calling and getting teased about your parents in the book connected with me when I was growing up,” she says.

“The book is about injustice and it’s about relationships and belief in people and not judging a book by its cover. It’s about the injustice that Harper Lee felt and the love of her family and their closeness.”

But it’s the simplicity of the story that Spiteri returns to.

“It’s a story where good wins through and bad people get what’s coming to them. Everyone has experienced a little bit of that at some point in their life and that’s why the book will always touch people.”

Sharleen Spiteri is a songwriter and the lead singer of Texas. She chose Harper Lee’s 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird, which will be released as an e-book for the first time on July 8. Said Harper Lee, “This is Mockingbird for a new generation." 

Human rights lawyer Shami Chakrabati also chose To Kill A Mockingbird. To find out what she thinks of #THISBOOK, read her article here.

What Katy Did: How a hit pop song kick started Kate Mosse's career

“Wuthering Heights endures because it is a novel of infinite colour. It’s a kaleidoscope.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

Picture a teenage Kate Mosse, sitting next to a tape recorder. She’s trying to record the Top 40 off the radio. A song comes on, and a girl a few years older than her is singing a song about a ghost tapping to get in at a window. 

That, of course, was Kate Bush, and her 1978 single ‘Wuthering Heights’. 

“The song was inspired by one of the most violent scenes, right at the beginning of the novel, where the ghost of Cathy puts her hand through the window. The narrator, Lockwood, drags her wrist across the broken glass to get himself free.  That, I thought, is the most powerful writing I've ever read,” Mosse says as we film in a warehouse in London's Shoreditch.

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a novel Mosse keeps coming back to and it’s been a different book every time.  

“To start with, you think you’re reading a love story, but it’s not a love story at all. It’s a novel about obsession, about revenge, about ghosts, about landscape, about the lives that women can or can’t lead. It’s the most beautifully poetic novel, and each time I’ve gone back to it, I’ve thought, “How does she do it?”

“When I first read, it was with a sense of admiration and awe that one writer, could have achieved so much in one, single novel.  Now, as a novelist myself, I admire her lyricism, her style, her plotting and her passion even more. It's the most extraordinary laying bare of relationships between women and men, within families, between children and absent parents. Hate, as well as love.” explains Mosse. 

“What I love about Wuthering Heights now, as someone in their fifties, and as a parent myself and most importantly as a writer myself, is that on the surface you feel that it is a novel about constraint, and about what women and men can, and do, do to each other.”

“It is a very violent novel. It is a novel full of ghosts. It is a novel that’s set up in dualities, black and white. There is this terrible place, Wuthering Heights. The name comes from the noise that the wind makes round this isolated place up there on the Yorkshire moors,” explains Mosse.

“Down in the valley is Thrushcross Grange - the perfect society. That’s acceptable society. All the way through the novel there’s storm and there’s peace. There’s dark and there’s light. All the descriptions of Heathcliff with black skin and black hair, and then the pale, elegant Isabella Linton, who is the person, of course, he marries and ruins.”

“Scratch beneath the surface and what you see is Emily Brontë writing about men and women as passionate, equal people.”

“With Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë changed the rules of what was acceptable for women to write. Up until that point, everything women had written was domestic. With this book, she said that anything a woman wants to write is acceptable.”

Kate Mosse, the Co-Founder & Chair of the Board of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, is the author of the multi-million selling Languedoc Trilogy - Labyrinth, Sepulchre, Citadel - as well as Gothic fiction, including The Winter Ghosts,  four works of non fiction and three plays, including the award winning Syrinx. On the board of the National Theatre and the Executive Committee of Women of the World, she won the Spirit of Everywoman Award in 2012 for services to women and the arts and was appointed OBE for service to literature in 2013. She chose poet and novelist Emily Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece Wuthering Heights. 

Actress Saffron Burrows sings the praises of this powerful story

“What’s brilliant about good writing and good storytelling, powerful novel-writing and biography, like Maya Angelou’s I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, is that it clearly traverses all terrain and gender and class and race.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  “The book I’ve chosen is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, says actress Saffron Burrows as she sits in her parents’ bohemian Islington home.

“For me, it was one of those books I read on my way to school in the morning. I stood at the traffic lights waiting to cross the road and couldn’t take my eyes off the page.”

“This is the first of six volumes of her autobiography, so it related to me at the age I read it, around 14. It’s all about her girlhood.”

“I remember feeling incredibly connected to this tale of someone who’d lived a very different experience to me. This part of the book takes place in the 1930s, in America’s South – and it’s a story that reflects the human condition. The racism and prejudice she suffers, just being a girl in that time and that place, makes this an incredibly powerful story.”

Burrows is clearly in awe of Angelou as a writer whose work makes a difference.

“What’s brilliant about good writing and good storytelling, powerful novel-writing and biographies, is that it clearly traverses all terrain and gender and class and race.”

“This book is full of contradiction and full of having to live in a state of contradiction, but with a message of joy that comes through in Angelou’s voice - something that would stand anyone in good stead for the rest of their life.”

A year ago, Burrows saw Maya Angelou, who is now 86, speak at an event. 

“She was incredibly full of energy and wisdom and humour, now, at the later part of her life. That acknowledgement of humour in the face of adversity was there very powerfully in this early edition of her autobiography.”

For Burrows, raised in a house full of books, reading is the “most wonderful, liberating way to spend your life and your time.” 

"If you fall in love with literature, it carries you through your life, and it carries you through lots of difficult situations."

 “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a book is for anyone who’s at an age where they want to fall in love with storytelling, to be moved by something, and to come to life afresh.”

Saffron Burrows is an English actress whose career began with the film In the Name of the Father (1993). Most recently, she’s appeared in the television series’ Boston Legal and Law and Order. She chose American author and poet Maya Angelou’s 1969 book I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

Reader, classics Professor Mary Beard loves this unlikely romance

“Jane Eyre raises all those wonderful questions about what women want, what really counts as happiness and success.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  We are filming in Professor Beard's Cambridge sitting room.

We’re here to talk about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a book Beard first read as a rather precocious ten year old. 

“It was the first ‘grown-up book’ I ever read,” she says.

“It’s also been a book that I’ve come back to over my life, so almost 50 years. I’ve read it again and again and it’s always been different.”

“Jane Eyre raises all those wonderful questions about what women want, what really counts as happiness and success. It cuts down to the real essentials of women’s options. Jane’s a working girl. She’s a governess. She’s independent.”

“She’s somebody who is finding their own way in the world. That feels very modern. There are all kinds of Victorian heroines that just don’t feel like us any longer but Jane really does. She’s out there, she’s on her own and she’s fending for herself.”

Quite a feat for a book published in 1846.

At its heart, Jane Eyre is the “happy ending story” of a girl who starts out life orphaned. 

“This book is about perseverance and survival and the idea of triumph over the odds.”

“She’s living with a really nasty family of relatives, sent away to a terrible school, becomes a governess, falls for the man of the house, nearly gets married to him - but he turns out to be married already, to a mad woman in the attic. Jane has a semi-dalliance with a bit of a prig but in the end comes back to Mr Rochester and gets the guy in the end,” Professor Beard neatly summarises.

“As you get more cynical and as you grow up, though, you see that maybe marriage wasn’t the only answer to a girl’s life.”

“On second and third readings, I became more interested in the other characters that tell a different story. The guy she marries has a previous wife, that’s very important in the story. You start thinking, “What was her story? Who was the first Mrs Rochester?” 

Then there is Rochester’s blindness. By the time Jane “gets the bloke”, he’s blind, no longer in his prime. That ambivalence fascinates Beard, as does Jane’s lack of (traditional) beauty.

“Jane is not particularly pretty. This book is great for women who don’t think of themselves as real cutesies because Jane’s attraction is her character.”

“I used to see myself as Jane because I never thought I was very pretty. I always thought I was going to be a working girl. As time has gone on I’ve got greater distance from her,” she says. 

“I read Jane Eyre and for a little while I became Jane Eyre. We’re as one.”

Most keenly, she has distance from the ending of the book, where Jane reaches that “ultimate female goal” of marriage. Professor Beard, whilst happily married, now knows that it’s not the only answer, as she may have thought aged ten.

“The sentence that stands out, and I think stands out for everybody, is the first sentence in the last chapter – ‘Reader, I married him. The quiet wedding we had.”’ That becomes such a sort of climatic moment for the book. In some ways it has entered people’s consciousness as the novel, the almost cliché of the novel’s happy ending or any novel’s happy ending, this is, ‘My reader, I married him,’ moment. I think that you can never get that line out of your head.” 

Professor Mary Beard is Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, a Professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy of Arts, blogger, BBC television presenter and Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Professor Beard recommends Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, a spin-off prequel to Jane Eyre which tells the story of the ‘first Mrs Rochester’.

Edith Bowman and more talk about the powerful influence of books

We asked women including Caitlin Moran, Edith Bowman and Susanna Reid to explain why they think certain books have the near-magical power to change us. 

Caitlin Moran shares her Twopence with everyone who’ll read it 

“I’ve given Twopence to Cross the Mersey, by Helen Forrester to everybody.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  Caitlin Moran commands a room. She’s hilarious, vibrant, loud and warm. We’re filming on the top floor of Soho’s Groucho Club, in a navy blue room that feels every inch like the literary members club it is. 

“I have chosen Twopence to Cross the Mersey, by Helen Forrester,” she announces.

“It was the first book that told me what my life would have been like if I’d been born before the age of the Welfare State.”

Moran sets the scene.

“I’m the eldest of eight children; raised on a council estate in Wolverhampton, by a disabled father. We were raised on benefits and, because we were taught at home, we didn’t go to school and so everyday we would go to the library and get books out. Between the ages of about 10 and 15, I read pretty much every book in my local library.”

“I read everything alphabetically, around about halfway through my journey, I started to read Helen Forrester. I read the book when I was 12 and just reading the blurb on the back just told me everything that I needed to know about it.”

She reads aloud,

“When Helen Forrester’s father went bankrupt in 1930, she and her six siblings were forced from their comfortable middle-class life into utmost destitution in Depression-ridden Liverpool. The running of the household and the care of her younger siblings all fell to 12-year old Helen”. 

For Moran, it was quite close to home. 

“It was as if I was the biography that I would have written if my parents had not been given benefits, if they’d had to rely on parish hand outs,” she says.

“If you were living in a tenement in Liverpool at that time, you’d have to go out and scavenge rubbish off the streets in order to be able to light a fire that will be enough to boil the kettle in order to make a cup of tea. You’d have to go out and beg for food.”

“This book is set at a point before welfare, at a point before female suffrage, at a point before antibiotics, at a point before modern medicine or contraception. She’s a literate girl, she comes from a well-to-do family, a well-spoken family but they’ve fallen on hard times. This book told me what my life would have been like 50 years earlier and the result was horrible. I was just reading this giving thankfulness for my life every single day.”

“That was when I started to educate myself about the history of England and how things had changed from this girl, who was so like me, to my life 50 years later.”

“I’ve given #ThisBook to everybody.”

 “If I could I would have a basic education module for every MP that entered Parliament and this is one of the books that I would get them to read because this is a letter from the heart from a child telling you what life was like before we had the welfare state. If you read that and you still want to cut back on welfare benefits then I would genuinely judge you as an immoral and heartless person.”

“When you read working class writers, like Helen Forrester, it makes you realise that your own life and your own story is the equal to any of the great Greek tragedies or myths. Each of us has an incredible story to tell and, if you tell it correctly and you tell it right, 50 years later you will still be making people want to press this book into your hands and just go, “You must read this”.”

“That’s what good books do. You get to the end of it and you feel less like you’re a problem and more like you’re a part of humanity that we’re all dealing with these problems together.”

 “That’s the immediacy and incredibleness about a book, that the writer is almost putting things into your mind. It’s the nearest to magic that we get.”

Caitlin Moran is a Times columnist and writer. She has written, amongst other things, the 2011 book How to Be A Woman. She chose Helen Forrester’s 1974 memoir, Twopence to Cross the Mersey.

Actress Gwendoline Christie’s warrior alter-ego captures the castle

“I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith made me realise that there’s nothing wrong with having a slightly eccentric nature.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  Raised in the countryside, witty, attracted to the unconventional:  actress Gwendoline Christie is describing Cassandra, the narrator of I Capture the Castle but could almost be describing herself.

We're filming in a gritty Hoxton warehouse, a far cry from the landscape of Game of Thrones.

“I feel a connection to Cassandra. Cassandra wants to be a writer. She wants to take a different path and that resonated with me.”

“This book is the story of a young girl, Cassandra Mortmain, whose family lives in a dilapidated castle, in a state of genteel poverty. She’s negotiating life, moving from a child into an adult.”

Christie deftly summarises the novel, written by Dodie Smith in the interwar period. Smith, a conscientious objector, had left England to live in Malibu, California and her yearning for a bohemian, romantic England is palpable on each page.

“It’s about the Mortmain family. The father is a writer who’s achieved great success with his novel Jacob’s Wrestling, which is an avant-garde experimental novel. It achieved global success including…in America. It’s loosely set in the ‘30s and the main character is a young girl called Cassandra. She is making the transition from child to adult.”

“She has a step-mother called Topaz, who’s a retired artist’s model with a penchant for naturism; an older sister called Rose, who’s a classic beauty and the hope for the family then, that she may marry someone with some money, as was one of the few options for women then. There’s a younger brother called Thomas. There’s a lodger called Stephen who becomes a movie star.”

“It’s just sprawling, eccentric and quite bats, a family trying to negotiate staying alive.”

Christie read the book twice as a teenager, seeing something of a kindred spirit in Cassandra. She revisited it a year ago, searching for something a little lighter after a stint of ‘gritty reads’. 

“It’s strangely illuminating about life. It’s full of very witty ruminations on the dynamics we experience in every day life and feels relevant, even though it’s a bohemian, 1930s family. Cassandra’s insights into the world around her are very perceptive.”

The story of Dodie Smith’s exhaustive writing process is another draw for Christie as well as an inspiration. 

“Smith made an enormous amount of effort with this book. She did all the drawings inside the book. She rewrote every single sentence, at least two or three times in order to make it seem effortless and seamless. I believe that she even created models of the house so that she was able to follow through the story and see if it really lived and worked. That rigor and determination and artistic discipline, I deeply admire,” explains Christie, who is well known for a similar discipline and commitment to her craft as an actress.

“I think also, possibly, from reading this book, we’re both more interested in the colourful, exotic, flamboyant and eccentric elements of life.”

“This book made me realise that there’s nothing wrong with, perhaps, having a slightly eccentric nature and that these characters are actually what makes life exciting.”

Gwendoline Christie is an actress best known for her role as warrior Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones. She chose Dodie Smith’s much loved coming of age tale, I Capture the Castle. Smith also wrote the classic 101 Dalmatians. 

Caitlin Moran and more reveal their fantasy fictional alter-ego

Caitlin Moran would be a two-headed alien, and Jennifer Saunders a pathologist. We asked a bevy of amazing women: Which non-fiction character would you play?

Eat my Dust: Comedian Jennifer Saunders reveals her darker side

“#ThisBook is not laugh out loud murder, it's quite serious murder. ”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  Comedian Jennifer Saunders and crime writer Patricia Cornwell would appear, at first glance, to have little in common except success and blonde hair! 

But the pair has something of a mutual admiration society. Cornwell was recently quoted in the NY Times as having read and thoroughly enjoyed Saunders’s memoir, Bonkers: My Life in Laughs. In another interview, she said that Saunders’s comedy makes her forget the darkness in life.

Yet it’s Cornwell’s dark subject matter that fascinates Saunders.

We are filming in a dressing room in London's Dominion Theatre, Saunders' beloved whippet Oliver at her feet, discussing books, acid baths, Patricia Cornwell - and blood. 

“I have met Patricia Cornwell and she is an extraordinary person.  She is quite a mysterious person too and I think that's why I like reading her books, because you can't quite get it.”

“I love a murder story and she is one of the best at writing murder fiction. It's like catching up on a sitcom, a murdercom,” she explains.

“In all her books, the main character is a forensic pathologist called Kay Scarpetta.  Every story starts with the murder that she then forensically investigates with her investigator, Pete Marino.”

“You've got a little bit of your forensics, you've got old fashioned police work and you've got a bit of FBI. The whole spectrum of everything you could want to know involved with the murder is here.”

In Dust (the twenty-first book in the series) the action centres round a mass killing at a Connecticut elementary school; and a dead woman discovered near Scarpetta’s home. Organised crime, political corruption, and a strange fluorescent dust all contribute to a tangled web of intrigue that Scarpetta and her team, of course, solve, eventually. 

“It's like being at an autopsy – but through a lot of glass.”

Dark fascinations colour Saunders’s reading history. 

“I used to read horror books; my favourite when I was growing up was the ‘Pan Book of Horror.’ They were just short stories of horror, pure horror, lots of blood, lots of monsters, lots of ghosts and murders.” 

“I enjoyed those; I'm not sure what it is about the investigation of death - it's a very human condition. A lot of murder is just really tragic circumstance - it's not all filled with evil, often it’s just very sad.”

Although sad, Saunders remains fascinated, reading widely on the subject, and enjoying forensic crime books both fact and fiction.

Comedian, screenwriter and actress Jennifer Saunders chose Patricia Cornwell’s book Dust. Dust is the most recent in Cornwell’s multi-million selling series of crime novels charting the escapades of medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. 

Comedian Sandi Toksvig takes Cold Comfort in this novel

“Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons is probably the book that changed my life. I had never realised was that it was possible for women to be funny. It had never occurred to me. I read this book and I thought, ‘That is what I want to do. I want to write funny things.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  “I had never realised that it was possible for women to be funny. It had never occurred to me. I read this book and I thought, ‘That is what I want to do. I want to write funny things',” says Sandi Toksvig as we sit in the sunshine in a South London park near her home that she often visits to walk, relax and read in.

“This book charted the course that my career has taken,” she explains.

Toksvig has built a career on her wit and words. 

She first read Cold Comfort Farm aged 11, living with her Danish family in New York where she grew up. It was an awakening.

“Here was this quintessentially English book. I had, up until then, read quite a lot of comic novels. I was an avid P. G. Wodehouse fan. I was a huge E. F. Benson fan.”

 “I love the writing style because it is extremely extravagant and Stella Gibbons has no worries at all about going far too far. It is completely over the top, and there is no question that unless people rein me back, particularly when I am writing live shows for the theatre or whatever, that is the style that I much prefer. Go a little bit bonkers,” she says.

“I would recommend this book to anybody who could do with stepping outside their own life and realising that actually, life is good fun and we are really here to enjoy ourselves.”

Cold Comfort Farm is the story of Flora Poste, a nineteen year old with not much to live on. She decides, having no particular skills, she will live off her relatives’ kindness. 

“She sends out letters to see which relatives she should live with, and it turns out to be the Starkadders, who own Cold Comfort Farm. She goes there determined to make their lives better. It’s a satire on those doom-laden English, rural novels; D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, a bit of the Bronte sisters,” explains Toksvig.

“Everybody on Cold Comfort Farm has an emotional problem and Flora sets out to solve these, partly with the help of a guide book she has called 'The Higher Common Sense.'”

“One of the glories of Gibbons’ writing is that she makes up words of how she thinks people in Sussex speak. So, for example, 'clettering,' which is to do with the washing up. So you might cletter with a clettering stick your plates. Mollocking, which is on the naughty side frankly.”

It’s that level of nuance and delicacy that appeals to Toksvig.

“I think we, as women, are more interested in detail. I think men like to write, and these are huge generalisations, of course, but I think they like their big, bold muscular fiction.”

“I prefer women’s work. I like the lightness of touch in much the same way as I prefer women tennis players. I just think they play a more interesting game, and I think that is true of women’s fiction.”

Sandi Toksvig OBE is a Danish-British writer, presenter, comedian, actress and producer on British radio and television. She currently presents The News Quiz on BBC Radio 4 and previously presented 1001 Things You Should Know on Channel 4. She has written more than 20 books. Her most recent is a novel called Valentine Grey, published in 2012. She chose Stella Gibbons’ novel Cold Comfort Farm, which was published in 1932.

DJ and presenter Edith Bowman joins the Lovely Bones brigade

“No book has brought out as much emotion in me as The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. In good ways and in bad ways, but in ways which are very necessary."

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  When Edith Bowman was seven, her cousin Suzie, who was a year older than her, died of cancer.

She is candid about this as we film on a sunny afternoon in April.

“When I read The Lovely Bones ten years ago, I had a massive connection with it because of my own loss. The grief was what I really connected with,” she says.

The Lovely Bones tells the story of a teenage girl called Susie Salmon who is raped and murdered walking home from school. It’s set in 1970’s America. The book is about Susie coming to terms with her own death – she narrates the book from a heavenly place, looking down on her family and friends and observing how they deal with their grief.

“I can relate to a lot of the characters and their experiences in that, especially her little sister. It reminds me of seeing my aunt and uncle, and my other cousins, trying to deal with that loss.”

It’s a book Bowman has bought for and recommended to many. 

“#THISBOOK is not, in any way, shape or form, a therapy book but there is something in it that is incredibly comforting. If you have dealt with loss or you are having trouble dealing with loss, it helps.”

“People skirt around talking about death, and saying the word ‘death.’ If someone has died, you would not go, ‘I am really sorry they died.’ You would go, ‘I am sorry for your loss,’ that kind of thing. There’s certain etiquette around death and how you are supposed to talk about it.”

There’s also a lack of open and honest conversation about rape and its impact. It’s something the author, Alice Sebold, experienced first hand – and not surprisingly it’s informed all of her books. 

“The police officer whom she saw after her own rape told her she was lucky to be alive. That’s why she called her other book Lucky,” explains Bowman.

“Alice Sebold writes about something that is so tragic but with such beauty, with honesty, and want. No book has brought out as much emotion in me as this book. In good ways and in bad ways, but in ways which are very necessary.”

Edith Bowman is a radio DJ and television presenter who has appeared on MTV, Channel Four, and BBC’s Radio 1. Bowman selected Alice Sebold’s 2002 novel The Lovely Bones. Alice Sebold’s autobiography Lucky was published in 1999 and is the account of the rape she suffered as a college student. 

Actress Zawe Ashton’s escape from the blue

“The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison struck a chord with me. This young girl is struggling with her self-worth and identity, thinking she’s bringing all of these bad things on herself because she doesn't have perfect, blonde locks and blue eyes.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

  The Bluest Eye follows the fortunes of Pecola Breedlove, a girl growing up in smalltown Ohio. 

“She's a young African-American girl who's growing up with Shirley Temple as the poster child for what beauty and normality is at that time in America. She's struggling with her identity because of growing up in that world,” explains actress Zawe Ashton, who is half-Ugandan, half-English. 

“Pecola thinks that if she had blue eyes, her life would be different and her self-worth would be higher. She comes from an extremely violent background – and she attributes it to the fact that she hasn't got the majority's idea of beauty.”

Ashton first read the novel aged seventeen on a gap year spent travelling through Cuba.

“It became my little companion, my world for this time while I was away from home.”

 “It struck a chord with me, this young girl struggling with those issues of self-worth and identity, and thinking that she's kind of bringing all of these bad things in on herself because she doesn't have these perfect, blonde locks and blue eyes.”

“I was talking to my best friend the other day, and I'm mixed-race; my mother's Ugandan, my dad's English. She's half-Jamaican, half-Ghanian, and we were sharing stories about being young girls of colour, and what that was like growing up in terms of comparing yourself to other children. She asked, ‘Did you ever used to do that thing where you put a duvet on your head and pretended it was this, long, flowing, amazing blonde Barbie hair?’ and I was like, ‘Oh my God! Yes I did!’.

“So for me, Pecola jumped off the page. She felt so familiar and so three-dimensional because she was like a lot of girls that I grew up with.”

“I really, truly escaped when I read this book. That's what art is, isn't it? It's supposed to be escapism and something that really makes you forget yourself for the time that you're immersed in it.”

“I love Toni Morrison because she's completely unafraid of her own style - this kind of non-chronological, magical way that she does. She doesn't shy away from the controversy of her material. It's hugely inspiring.”

Ashton also loves Morrison for her lyricism, quoting her favourite passage in the book, which she calls the ‘heart line’.

“Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs; all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured. ’Here', they said, 'This is beautiful, and if you are on this day worthy, you may have it.'”

“When I'm acting, I pick what's called a 'heart line' for a character. It’s a line in the script that you can always go back to if you ever feel like you're at sea. It gets you back into the ‘heart’ of that person,” Ashton explains.

“That’s the heart line from the book, for me. It's a line that just really resonates in all the amazing ways that Toni Morrison achieves with her language and her subject matter.”

Zawe Ashton is an actress and playwright who appeared in the film Dreams of a Life, Channel4 comedy drama series Fresh Meat and play Gone Too Far! She selected Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. 

How a novel helped inspire Dawn O’Porter’s fruitful writing career

“Oranges are Not The Only Fruit, by Jeanette Winterson is a reminder to be who you are, whatever stage in life you're at.”

Photograph by Alice Hawkins.

Articles written from interviews by Sophie Robinson, edited by Natalie Smith.

   “Mother/daughter relationships have always been painted as this kind of idyllic, supportive, lovely, taken for granted type relationship, and that wasn't my experience of having a mother, because mine wasn't around,” says Dawn O’Porter, whose mother died when she was seven years old. 

 “As a teenager, I sought out people and stories about girls who couldn't really rely on the support of their mothers.”

So this book struck a chord, right from the very first page. 

“Oranges are not the Only Fruit is about a young girl named Jeanette and her very strange relationship with her very religious mother.”

Jeanette is a lesbian, and as a result, her mother completely disowns her.

“She’s a young girl who's absolute in what she feels, and doesn't question, really, the fact that she can't feel the way that she feels. She just is what she is. I think to read a character like that as a teenage girl is very inspiring. You are who you are, and if people don't agree with that, well, that's their problem,” explains O’Porter.

“Jeanette just strove forward. Sleeping with girls, being a lesbian, and doing what she felt was right for her. I found that very encouraging, very brave, and, at the time, quite shocking.”

O’Porter read this book as a teenager in the 1990s, on the small island of Guernsey where she grew up. It was a time and place where to be gay was “a really big deal”. At the time, she knew one gay girl and two gay boys. 

“It was hard for them to come out and be accepted, and in Jeanette's world it was even harder.”

“#THISBOOK is a reminder to be who you are, whatever stage in life you're at.”

 A writer herself, O’Porter has learnt much from Winterson’s work. 

“She's taught me, as a writer, to be incredibly honest and not hold back, and not let an editor – not your physical editor, but the editor in your head – stop you writing about the grim reality of working out who you are as a person. She's taught me to never, ever worry about what people will think when they read the book. She is one of the most honest and most raw writers I’ve ever read.”

Dawn O’Porter is a writer, television presenter and actress. Her second book, Goose, was published in April this year. She chose Jeanette Winterson’s 1985 novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Winterson later wrote a memoir called Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal – the ‘true’ and far darker version of ‘Oranges’.