Novelist Andrew Miller has shared the books that shaped his life and career, from childhood favourites to the novel that made him want to write. In an interview, he recalled his earliest reading memory: sitting on the sofa with his mother reading Mabel the Whale by Patricia King, a moment he describes as having 'the serenity of an icon'.
Miller's favourite book growing up was Rosemary Sutcliff's The Eagle of the Ninth, set in Roman Britain. He remembers reading it in bed with his father on Sunday mornings, noting how the setting of reading is integral to the experience. The book that changed him as a teenager was not a book but a school production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which he played Cobweb. He says the performance at dusk, surrounded by Wiltshire fields, poured into him the richness of language and the sexiness of theatre.
The writer who changed his mind was Albert Camus, whose The Myth of Sisyphus he read at 18. Miller describes Camus as 'very cool' and his philosophy as stylish acceptance of life's absurdity. The book that made him want to be a writer was D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, which he read for A-level at 17. He found it overwhelming and says the final scenes forced him to his feet, madly excited, thinking there was no better way to spend a life than creating something like it. He notes that the novel was censored in 1915, with over 1,000 copies burned.
Miller later returned to James Joyce, having initially avoided him out of loyalty to Lawrence due to critic F.R. Leavis's influence. He now sees both as precious. Recently, he has been rereading E.M. Forster, whose novels he finds deeply sane and relevant. Books he could never read again include thrillers by Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, and Ian Fleming, which he enjoyed as a teen but would now feel like struggling back into his school uniform. An author he discovered later in life is Penelope Fitzgerald.
