Which bestseller does Sabine Durrant think is ‘overwritten twaddle’?
Writer and Journalist, Sabine Durrant
What Book…
… are you reading now?
The Rest Of Our Lives by Ben Markovits and I’m loving it.
It’s about a father who, after dropping his daughter at college, decides not to go home to his wife but to keep on driving.
It’s funny and wise about marriage and family and getting older, and it has the perfect unreliable narrator.
I’ve no idea where he’s going to end up – not just geographically.
… would you take to a desert island?
For comfort, I always turn to either Georgette Heyer (Black Sheep, my favourite) or early Jilly Cooper (Octavia, ditto).
But I might be on this island for a long time in which case I’d require length (to keep me occupied) and heft (squashing mosquitoes) so I’m going to say Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens.
It’s got a wonderful Thames setting (top Dickens descriptive potential), a cracking thriller plot and the darkest, deepest villain in the oppressed and obsessive Bradley Headstone, a school master gripped by jealousy.
… first gave you the reading bug?
Enid Blyton prevented any school holiday from being lonely or dull
The only child of a single parent, I spent a lot of my holidays with my grandparents, who believed in an afternoon rest.
It was during one of these periods of enforced isolation that I came upon a bookshelf in their spare room.
I started with H. E. Bates’s The Feast Of July because it had the brightest cover (content a bit traumatic). After that, I pulled out the first in a dull row of identical beige hardbacks to discover a whole new world.
Intrigue! Mystery! A gang of friends! The book was called The Castle Of Adventure by Enid Blyton and, lined up next to it, were seven more in the series!
They proved an entry drug to The Famous Five and Malory Towers, then Agatha Christie and P. G. Wodehouse, and everything that Putney Library had to offer (including more H. E. Bates). My childhood was never lonely or dull again.
… left you cold?
I’m always a bit anti those books ‘everyone’ is reading. But ‘everyone’ kept telling me to read Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens. I’d love it, they said. I didn’t. Pretentious, overwritten twaddle. Sorry.
Dead Heat by Sabine Durrant (Century £12.99) is out on March 12 and will be available from the Mail Bookshop