Monday, February 23, 2026

Tessa Hadley: ‘Uneasy books are good in uneasy times’

Tessa Hadley

The

Books

0f my

life

Tessa Hadley: ‘Uneasy books are good in uneasy times’

This article is more than 2 months old

The author on Anna Karenina, the brilliance of Anita Brookner and finally getting Nabokov

Tessa Hadley

Friday 28 November 2025

My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I hated the girls’ grammar school I went to, and in revenge filled my break times with historical novels by Jean Plaidy. These flooded the oppressive grey world of the school with their glorious drama, pregnancies and deformities and adulteries, messengers eating their own shoe leather because they brought bad news.

The writer who changed my mind
When I moved myself to the comprehensive school, we studied the Liverpool poets and Stan Barstow. Then a new teacher read us An Horatian Ode by Andrew Marvell, on the execution of Charles I. You can’t tell what side he’s on … New possibilities of subtlety in writing opened up.

The book that made me want to be a writer
All the books I loved, from the beginning, made me want to try. Storytelling was the most powerful magic I knew: it got expressed first in the games I played out with my friends. Written down though, words were puny for such a long time. Encountering the intricacy of Henry James’s fiction – What Maisie Knew first – stirred up that longing intensely, to make something intricate and alive on the page. But it defeated the longing at the same time – because who could match this?

The author I came back to
Vladimir Nabokov was too slippery, I couldn’t get hold of him; Speak, Memory was my way in eventually. When I knew what he made of his own life, I began to understand his ironies, his account of America.

The book I reread
When I first read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I was Kitty’s age, then I longed to be gorgeously amorous like Anna, then I was worn down with domesticity and children like Dolly. Now I’m closer to the old countess at the end of the book, growing irrelevant in the margins.

The author I could never read again
Well, probably Jean Plaidy …

The book I discovered later in life
For a long time I thought that I wouldn’t like Anita Brookner; I’d got the idea, for some foolish reason, that she was perfumed and ladylike. Then I opened Latecomers and knew from the first sentence how wrong that was. When you discover a new author their work stretches out before you, an undiscovered continent.

The book I am currently reading
I’m a fan of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and I’ve just finished his short novel Reticence. A man with his baby son in a pushchair visits a coastal town desolate with absence. It’s a little skit and a mockery really, a crime drama with no crime apart from a dead cat, and yet its repetitions are deliciously hypnotic, the moon and the sea and the empty house …

My comfort read
At first in the pandemic I reread my old children’s books, which is embarrassing but was stabilising at the time. Comfortable books, though, aren’t always comforting; uneasy books are better in uneasy times.

THE GUARDIAN

Nussaibah Younis / ‘The Bell Jar helped me through my own mental illness’

Nussaibah Younis

Nussaibah Younis: ‘The Bell Jar helped me through my own mental illness’

The author on taking solace in Joan Didion, discovering Donna Tartt and being cheered up by David Sedaris

Nussaibah Younis

Friday 6 February 2026

My earliest reading memory
The first books I became obsessed with were Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories Malory Towers and St Clare’s. When I was eight, I’d hide them under my pillow and read by the hallway light when I was supposed to be asleep.

My favourite book growing up
Roald Dahl’s Matilda. I felt woefully misunderstood by the world and longed to be adopted by a very pretty teacher with only cardboard for furniture. I spent a lot of time trying to make a pen move by concentration alone. Sometimes I still try.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath when I was 16 and it was a shocking and disorienting introduction to mental illness in young women. A couple of years later, when I experienced a serious bout of mental illness, The Bell Jar helped conceptualise what was happening.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh is a brilliantly funny satire of war journalism that still rings disturbingly true. It inspired me to write a comedy about a bonkers UN programme in Iraq – which turned into my debut novel, Fundamentally.

The book or author I came back to
I had Donna Tartt’s The Secret History on my shelf for 10 years without ever reading it. Then I found myself alone and unwell one Christmas and I disappeared into its enchanting, atmospheric world. Sometimes a book is there for you at just the right time.

The book I reread
In moments of grief, I return to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. It is a word-perfect exploration of the insanity brought on by loss, and it helps me feel less alone in the darkest times. I always have a big, cathartic cry when I read it.

The book I could never read again
Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. I’m sick to death of reading about hypersexual misogynists obsessed with their own victimhood. I don’t find it clever or interesting.

The writer who changed my mind
I was 19 when I read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and it totally reframed how I thought about the role of marriage and children in my life. The book depicts the suffocating impact of expectations on women to prioritise caring roles over all else. It made me commit to achieving my own dreams, rather than expecting a child to do it for me.

The book I am currently reading
Slumberland by Paul Beatty. It’s a little tough going, but he has some genius one-liners and brutally cutting observations about the racism experienced by an African American musician living in Berlin.

My comfort read
Whenever I want to be cheered up, I read David Sedaris. At heart, I’m an older gay man with health anxiety, obsessed with picking up litter and controlled by my Fitbit.

THE GUARDIAN

Georgi Gospodinov / ‘Jorge Luis Borges gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom’

Georgi Gospodinov

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Books

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Georgi Gospodinov: ‘Jorge Luis Borges gave me an exhilarating sense of freedom’

The Bulgarian Booker winner on the letter he wrote to JD Salinger, the allure of Homer’s Odyssey and the magic of Thomas Mann

Georgi Gospodinov

Friday 20 Feb 2026

My earliest reading memory
I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die.

My favourite book growing up
I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy.

The author that changed me as a teenager
All novels that contained erotic scenes – because of the acute shortage of eroticism in the late socialist Bulgaria of the 1980s. Also around that time I discovered JD Salinger. I reread his stories obsessively, without being sure I understood everything. At 17, I decided to write him a letter, trying to provoke him into breaking his silence. Of course, I never sent it. Much later, that story found its way into my memoir, The Story Smuggler.

The writer who changed my mind
Jorge Luis Borges. When the first translations of his work appeared in Bulgaria, I was 21, shortly before the wall fell – a crucial moment. It was as if I suddenly understood what literature is capable of, and how there are no real borders between genres. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom, but also of a shared secret. Memory, erudition, heart, science and myth – all of it was there.

The book that made me want to be a writer
The poems of two tragic Bulgarian poets: Peyo Yavorov and Nikola Vaptsarov. I began writing poetry in secret. Later, I was found out.

The book I reread
Homer’s Odyssey. We probably mentioned it or read parts of it at school, and perhaps that was what put me off it for so long. After turning 40, I began to truly understand it – and to reread it, seeing it differently each time. The theme of the father increasingly drew me in, the bond between father and son. Then there’s the great theme of return – not only the return home but also to the past – and memory, the question of who remembers us unconditionally and recognises us, like the dog. In my last two novels I have been in dialogue with this book again and again.

The book I discovered later in life
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It always stood out on my bookshelf, but for years I never reached for it. I imagined it would be very gloomy, heavy, full of endless reflection. When I read it in my late 40s it wasn’t love at first sight, but the story didn’t let me go. I love books I can converse with, even enter into Socratic arguments with. It was very important to me while I was writing Time Shelter. You think you write in solitude, but in truth you are in constant dialogue with other books and authors.

The book I am currently reading
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. A powerful novel that seems, like Borges’s maps, to try to contain the world – and time – at a scale of 1:1. A book for slow winter reading.

THE GUARDIAN