Kiran Millwood Hargrave's favourite books
Welcome to 'The books that shaped me' - a Good Housekeeping series in which authors talk us through the reads that stand out for them. This week, we're hearing from Kiran Millwood Hargrave, whose new book In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen (Orion Children’s Books, £7.99) is out now in paperback.
Kiran is the author of 10 books, both for children and adults, including The Girl of Ink And Stars, Julia And The Shark and The Mercies. She's a former winner of the Wainwright Prize, the Waterstones Book Prize, and the British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year. She is also an ambassador for this year's Independent Bookshop Week, which runs from 15-22 June, and will be appearing at events during the week.
What impact have books have had on you?
Books as objects are a constant source of pleasure - I love the resurgence of details like foiling, embossing and the sprayed edges. I’m all for the fetishisation of physical books, and love how YA book boxes have led the way here. But I’ll take stories however they’re delivered, physically or digitally or audio or orally. Stories are my lifeblood, whether in books or audiobooks or the mouths of friends - I couldn’t survive without them. I am an author because of my love of stories - if I could never write another story again I’d just about survive because I could carry on reading them. I come from a family of readers, and were never happier than when we’re lying on a beach ignoring each other, noses in our books.
The childhood book that’s stayed with me...
Skellig by David Almond is a perfect book, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s about faith and the unknowns of the world, death and love, friendship and football. I love how Almond weaves in the work of Blake, and tackles the large and small challenges of life with such child-friendly appeal. It’s stood the test of time, and I can see it doing so forever. And who wouldn’t want to find a crotchety angel/owl man in their garage? Recently I revisited the story as my husband illustrated the twenty-fifth anniversary addition, and it remains as resonant, rich, and entertaining as ever. As a writer, sometimes it’s easy to find the stitches in other people’s work, the tricks. If I can read and re-read a book without it unravelling, that’s when the craft ceases being labour and turns into something transcendent. Skellig has this.
My favourite book of all time...
For my 16th birthday, my mum organised for 16 friends and family members to gift me a copy of their favourite book, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the one my mum chose. It’s a lush, complex, sticky web of a book, the narrative spiralling and enclosing you, spitting you out in odd places temporally and spatially. The language is baroque and ornate, even deliberately obscure in places, and all the characters name are the same down the generations. You can take it as a family saga, a moral comment on war, a comic interpretation of history, or as countless love stories told back to back. It’s so romantic, in a true sense, about human beings and the communities they form. I love the line: ‘Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.’ It’s a book that demands a lot of you as a reader, but rewards you tenfold. I’ve re-read it almost every year since, and it keeps throwing new storylines and meanings up for me. It’s a story that’s grown alongside me, as well as contributed to that growth. It is also famously unfilmable; and I love stories that are unapologetically suited to their medium first and foremost. That said, I’ll be watching the Netflix adaptation with interest.
The book you wish I’d written...
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood is the most extraordinary work of historical fiction, and has so many facets I admire: readability combined with intelligence, surety of voice coupled with a deliciously unreliable narrator, an evocation of time and place through the details that actually matter to the characters’ story. Story first, that is gospel to me, and Atwood is constantly adapting to tell the best stories she can in the best way. Sometimes she fails, and that too is exciting to me. Alias Grace is a very clever book but wears its cleverness lightly. It’s earnest without being mawkish, which is something I strive for in my own books. Atwood’s career is inspiring - she’s written plays, poetry, novels, for children, and adults. She follows the stories. Other stand outs for me are Oryx and Crake, The Edible Woman, Blind Assassin and Cats Eye. All very different, undeniably Atwood.
The book I wish everyone would read...
I think a lot of adults could benefit from re-reading Winnie-the-Pooh by AA Milne, or at least the Tao of Pooh. Something gets lost in our growth into adulthood - we forget children aren’t a different species, that the landscapes of our childhood are the places we go on to become the guardians of. Life isn’t all death and taxes. We could all be better humans if we held onto the lessons taught to us by children’s books.
The book that got me through a hard time...
In the grips of a depression that lasted most of my 20s, I could read very little. It was like living with only half my soul. But poetry was a godsend - little superb slices of life, delivered beautifully and economically. Staying Alive, an anthology by Bloodaxe, has specific poems to soothe you in specific moments. Alongside Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, it’s the book I gift most often to friends grieving or struggling with their mental health.
The book that uplifts me...
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington is an uproarious, anarchic, surreal gut punch of a book, about an elderly woman who is packed off to a bizarre nursing home by her family. It’s short, so perfect if life feels overwhelming, very funny, a bit silly, and excruciatingly tender. Be warned: things get very strange.
In The Shadow Of The Wolf Queen by Kiran Millwood Hargrave is out now
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