The Novel That Has Made The Most Impact

The Book That Has Impacted Me Most: David Horn

Published March 18, 2014 | By Laura

Self published author, David Horn talks about the book that’s impacted him the most.

In just under 1000 days between 1347 and 1351 the black death swept across Europe. When it finally left, 25 million people lay dead. In “The Great Mortality – An Intimate History of the Black Death,” published by Harper Perennial in 2005, John Kelly takes us into the fascinating and often frightening world of 14^th century Europe and into the lives of the people who lived there. We spend time in community after community, city after city, and country after country, where simple people going about their lives are stalked by a menace that cannot be seen, cannot be understood, and cannot be stopped. Continue reading →

Jon Rance

Published March 3, 2014 | By Laura

Jon Rance is the author of Happy Endings and This Thirtysomething Life.

Today, Jon talks about the book that has had the most impact on him..

There have been quite a few books that have influenced me over the years from the brilliant Catcher in the Rye as a teenager, to Mike Gayle’s Turning Thirty, but today I’m going to talk about One Day by David Nicholls.

For those who haven’t read it (which is probably no-one), it’s a heartbreaking, funny, poignant, and romantic book following two people (Dex and Em) over twenty years on the same day each year.

The reason this book had such a huge impact on me is because it wasn’t just wonderfully written, the characters weren’t just incredibly well thought out and the plot wasn’t just gripping, but above all that it had this perfect and novel idea at the heart of it. Two people. Twenty years. One day.

You see the thing is, Continue reading →

Bella Osborne

Published February 26, 2014 | By Laura

Bella Osborne

Bella picks the book that’s impacted her the most.

This is a very difficult question to answer. A few obvious answers immediately flew to mind, like the Boden catalogue as this is a book that impacts my bank balance on an all too frequent occurrence. A little more thought brought my favourite childhood book to the fore which was ‘The One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ by Doddie Smith although the only real impact I think that book has had is my compulsion for things that are spotty (see earlier reference to Boden addiction).

There was a chicklit book that I once read that when I had persevered to the end it gave me the encouragement that if they had been published then I at least stood I fighting chance – book and author will of course remain nameless.

When you sit down and really think about it, it’s amazing how many books you have read and loved and remember fondly. I love a bit of poetry so Wendy Cope would always make it into my top five books but to choose just one is a hard task.

So after a few cups of tea Continue reading →

Trisha Ashley

Published February 17, 2014 | By Laura

Simon & Schuster, 2012

Trisha Ashley talks about a book she’s read that’s made an impact on her.

One of the most memorable books I’ve read recently is Leah Fleming’s novel, The Captain’s Daughter. The story begins with the sinking of the Titanic and something that happens amid the ensuing carnage and confusion, which will have repercussions that echo down decades.

There’s more than one love story in this huge and sweeping epic and more than one kind of love, as the stories and lives of several families are entwined over the years. To say a novel took you on a journey is a cliché, but this one certainly did – and a mystery tour at that, since I found it impossible to guess where we were going until we got there. I don’t want to give anything away if you haven’t read it, but the resolution literally hangs by a lacy thread…

Continue reading →

Cathie Hartigan

Published February 12, 2014 | By Laura

Cathie Hartigan-

Cathie Hartigan was a pianist and a music teacher until she swapped keyboards and became a writer and teacher of creative writing. She talks to us today about the novel that has impacted her the most…

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

The sheer size of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy creates an impact. Its fat spine takes up four books-worth of space on the shelf. I took this monster thirteen hundred page novel with me on holiday twenty years ago and although I was in Italy, for much of the time I was transported to India.

But it wasn’t the foreign travel that provided the book’s greatest hook for me. At the heart of the novel is a simple question. Continue reading →

Rebecca Braunton

Published January 20, 2014 | By Laura

On The Air

Rebecca is the author of On The Air. Today, she talks about the book that has made an impact on her.

I moved house recently, and when faced with my monolith-like bookshelf I decided it was time for a little cull. A few books that I had read once and enjoyed were tossed (sorry: placed, lovingly) into a hessian bag and ferried across the road to the local Age Concern shop, but there was one book I knew I wouldn’t have parted with in a million years.

I first met Captain Corelli and his mandolin at college (steady on, I’ll make the jokes). I’d been given a beautiful virgin copy of the book ready for my annotations, and as a class we began to read through certain chapters in class, ending each ‘lecture’ as we called it with a series of questions on each chapter. This method had been practiced before with many texts from Shakespeare to McEwan. Normally the books you study at college or uni are groundbreaking and vastly important, but oftentimes boring and irrelevant; especially for a lovelorn sixteen-year-old who thought her life made up the centre of the whole universe.

Continue reading →

Sue Moorcroft

Published January 14, 2014 | By Laura

Sue Moorcroft

Sue Moorcroft is the author of Want to Know a Secret, Starting Over and Is This Love?

Today, Sue tells us about the book that’s had the most impact on her…

Dream a Little Dream. When I chose to give Dominic Christy the neurological condition of narcolepsy, which causes uncontrolled sleep, I hadn’t realised what a fantastical and hard-to-understand condition it is. I became a research junkie and in September 2013, Narcolepsy UK asked me to speak at their conference about why I wrote that book and how I did my research. Quite a few people with narcolepsy have now read Dream and they seem to feel that I’ve done OK with my portrayal. Satisfying.