In the end it is impossible to get this down to a single book: apart from anything else, I suspect that the strongest influences are probably not conscious. Or possibly Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea (the original trilogy). The book that had the greatest influence on my writing Well, there might be one, but she says three things and vanishes immediately.Ī still from the 2005 film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I’ll keep going.Ī word of warning: it is a book of its times. I have read The Man Who Was Thursday many, many times, but I still don’t understand it. He makes London feel like a fairytale, which to him I think it was. Chesterton describes scenes and objects and colours with an almost heraldic vividness – or, looked at another way, as if they were pages in a modern graphic novel. But it’s an odd sort of nightmare – one where terror keeps dissolving into cheerfulness (which is the opposite way round from most nightmares, and from a lot of contemporary fiction). It’s an extraordinary novel, funny and clever. The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton. Jane Austen’s Emma is quite different today from when I read it first as a teenager. This question also works the other way round: my life keeps changing books. From Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman I learned to be courageous in writing. From Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx I learned that you didn’t have to write a 21st-century novel if you didn’t want to you could write a 19th-century one. All sorts of books throughout my life have nudged me this way and that – like winds in a sail, I suppose.

Susanna clarke book