Every writer has their loadstone books — the ones that shifted something fundamental in how they perceive the world and, by extension, how they write about it. Here are five that changed the trajectory of my work.
When I first read Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, I was a twenty-year-old English student who thought novels needed plots. Calvino showed me they could be something else entirely: architecture, music, a series of conversations between an emperor and an explorer. It gave me permission to structure The Glass Meridian the way I did.
Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping taught me that landscape could be a character. Her descriptions of the Idaho lake and its encroaching wildness influenced every passage I’ve ever written about the Scottish coast. The way she writes silence — the spaces between words — remains something I aspire to.
Then there’s Borges, of course. His story “The Garden of Forking Paths” planted the seed for my obsession with maps and the spaces between what is charted and what remains unknown. Without Borges, none of my books would exist.