What Writers Read: 35 Writers on their Favourite Book by Pandora Sykes

Author:Pandora Sykes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Jojo Moyes is a British novelist and screenwriter, best known for her 2012 novel, Me Before You, which sold 14 million copies worldwide and was adapted into a feature film starring Sam Claflin and Emilia Clarke. The author of 15 novels, she has sold over 38 million books worldwide.

Diana Evans

on Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I read Middlesex by American novelist Jeffrey Eugenides on a beach in Ko Samui, Thailand. Sometimes I was in a hammock between two trees with the ocean at the edge of my vision. Sometimes the sea was behind me and I was lying on a mat on the sand, completely enraptured. The book went with me back to my yoga shack when the sun went down. I took it with me to pranayama sessions and left it at the edge of the hall in case there was a minute to read. I read it on the bus into town, on the plane, in the airport lounges. I almost missed Thailand because of it. When I think of Thailand, I also think of Middlesex, of Detroit, of Greece and Mount Olympus.

The timing is significant. I had recently arrived at a place of temporary freedom. I had been writing a book, my first novel, for some years, a difficult novel, one that I had doubted at several abandonments along the way that I could ever finish. Eventually I had taken it with me to do a creative writing MA in Norwich and there completed it, and soon afterwards got a publishing deal. That was how I was free. I was out of the other side of the long 26a tunnel and had a little money to be a writer on a yoga retreat, plus I did not yet have children. I was in the before-time, at the threshold of the next projects of work and life, and my mind was gaping open for a good story. I fell in headlong.

It is of course the Pulitzer Prize-winning tale of Calliope Stephanides, who becomes Cal Stephanides, an intersex man born into a Greek-American family with a variant gene. The novel follows this gene all the way from its instigation in Asia Minor to its physical and psychic manifestation in its prime carrier, through his childhood in Detroit, his escape to San Francisco to discover his identity, and a portion of his adult life in Berlin from where he is narrating the story, drawing on some elements of Eugenides’s own life and family history. It’s a vast novel comprising social commentary and historical detail and churning, infectious humour, and its greatest strength is its mastery of character. It is character that makes it so unforgettable.

Character is the root of fiction, the very core, though not necessarily the beginning. The seed of an idea can begin with a place or a theme or an object or even a plot, but at some point in the process of gestation all this is met with character, which makes it dance, or shine, or reverberate. The human factor is the thing.

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