Maggie O'Farrell
Illustration by Alan Vest


Books that made me

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Life is too short to waste time on books you don’t like'

This article is more than 6 years old

The award-winning author on being inspired by Angela Carter and struggling with Henry James

Maggie O’Farrell
Friday 2 April 2020

The book I am currently reading
Danielle Evans’s Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self. I picked it not knowing anything about her – that fabulous title was enough – and I was swept away by the energy and immediacy of the stories. She has all the verve and daring of the best of Junot Díaz, with the insight of Edith Pearlman. I’m slowing down because I don’t want the book to end.

Maggie O'Farrell at home in Edinburgh. 

Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Fiction comes from what you don’t know’

From a young age, the author was told that one of her ancestors had drawn some of the first maps of Ireland. Then she found a photograph, and embarked on a journey to discover his story

Maggie O’Farrell

Sun 31 May 2026

very family has its myths. In mine, we were told that one of our antecedents had worked on the first maps of Ireland. As a child, I used to picture a solitary person in unspecified period dress – a tailcoat, perhaps some kind of cravat – striding pensively about fields and mountains, pen in hand. On summer holidays, I would stare out of the window of our red car as Donegal or Galway rolled by and wonder that such a task could be achieved. How did one man set about drawing a map of a whole country, of these towns and strands and trees and rivers?

 

A soldier stands guard in a street in Medellín. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Colombia prepares to go to polls in election shadowed by resurgence of political violence

Sunday’s presidential vote is contest between left and right – and between contradictory proposals for dealing with the decades-long armed conflict

Tiago Rogero

Saturday 30 May 2026

Mateo Pérez Rueda was one internship away from completing a degree in political science. The 24-year-old also worked as a bicycle delivery rider and sold fruit salads and juice to finance his passion: the Colombian independent digital magazine El Confidente.

 

I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen. Illustration: Walker Publishers / Jon Klassen

‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling

From The Twits to The Gruffalo and an angry bear in search of his hat… Quentin Blake, Cressida Cowell, Axel Sheffler, Lauren Child and more reveal how they bring children’s books to life

Stuart Heritage

Sat 30 May 2026

Spread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.

Why Mara Wilson Agreed to Voice the Audiobook for Katherine Applegate's Wombat Waiting

Mara Wilson and Katherine Applegate.Credit : 

Elizabeth Weinberg; courtesy of Katherine Applegate

Why Mara Wilson Agreed to Voice the Audiobook for Katherine Applegate's Wombat Waiting

The new book from the author of the 'Animorphs' and 'Everworld' series follows a dog who's displaced by wildfires and looking for her person

By Victoria Edel 

 

Published on May 12, 2026 12:24PM EDT

Virginia Evans / ‘I loved books about things that can’t exist’

Virginia Evans© Austin Joffe

The 

Books

 0f my 

life

Virginia Evans: ‘I loved books about things that can’t exist’

The Women’s prize-shortlisted novelist on taking inspiration from John Steinbeck, Joan Didion and Jhumpa Lahiri, and weeping through Little Women in her 30s

Virginia Evans

Friday 29 May 2026 10.00 BST

My earliest reading memory
I’m not sure what we were reading – The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams or the poems in Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein – but I was undoubtedly with my sister, two years older, who set the example for me to be a reader. I picture us in the back of our family car or laying across our twin beds in the room we shared.

My favourite book growing up
I loved mysteries and fantasy worlds. I read so many of the Nancy Drew books, and The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. And I loved the Narnia stories and The Wind in the Willows. I loved books about things that can’t exist. I suppose it’s all escapism – crimes solved by children, talking animals, time travel, people two inches tall. I always loved to slip into another, better world.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath at 15. It was my first real understanding of what fiction can do, how far a story can go, how words can be put to the intricacies of living. It stretched my empathy, seeing what the Joad family endured, learning through story what had happened in that place and time in American history.

The writer who changed my mind
Joan Didion. Every time I read her work, I am changed in some way. Her writing makes me think of the world, people, politics, the land, water, time, motherhood, marriage differently.

The book that made me want to be a writer
I was in college and majoring in English and creative writing. I read Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and I discovered what can be done with language and words to make something beautiful and compelling. I thought: I have to do this, I can do this, I will do this.

The author I came back to
I tried Jane Austen too young. I didn’t understand the language or the story. I felt lost. When I came back to Pride and Prejudice in my late 20s, I enjoyed it tremendously.

The books I reread
Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Steinbeck’s East of Eden are the books I read again and again, and in fact I’m due for a pass of East of Eden right about now.

The book I could never read again
I devoured the Millennium series by Stieg Larsson, but was terrified throughout. I have considered going back, but I was so disturbed by it I don’t think I will.

The book I discovered later in life
I didn’t read Little Women by Louisa May Alcott until just before the 2019 film, and I wept through the scenes of Jo trying to make it as an author. It hit so close, and of course I had not made it. I was still spreading the pages across the floor in hope and despair. I had my own children by then, and identified so much with the girls’ mother – something that would not have happened if I’d read it when I was young.

The book I am currently reading
While I Was Gone by Sue Miller. This is a reread for me. I discovered Miller 15 years ago, just walking through a used book store and looking at spines. I love her stories, especially some of those older ones. I love the eerie undercurrent of the book and the construction of the whole thing – from the story arc down to the sentences.

My comfort read
Can I pick a few? The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett, Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans is shortlisted for the Women’s prize

THE GUARDIAN