Like William Faulkner's The Wild Palms, the novel features a botched illegal abortion. When he leaves her, she begins a downward spiral. Once she leaves school, and she is cut off financially by the stepmother, Hester, Anna tries to support herself as a chorus girl, then becomes involved with an older man named Walter who supports her financially. It tells of the semi-tragic descent of its young protagonist Anna Morgan, who is moved from her Caribbean home to England by an uncaring stepmother, after the death of her father.

Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.Voyage in the Dark was written in 1934 by Jean Rhys. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. I’d rather be forgotten and then rediscovered like Zora Neale Hurston.īird Summons by Leila Aboulela is published by W&N. The book I’d most like to be remembered for Family and friends shouldn’t pay to read it. My mother teaching me how to read the Qur’an. I’m most ashamed though of not studying any Shakespeare. In this way many of the classics passed me by. I studied statistics at university, and the English literature covered at my secondary school was rudimentary. The book I’m most ashamed not to have read You can throw up a bad meal but what you read stays inside you forever.

It was gripping but that feast of heartbreak and cruelty was releasing toxins into my system. I had to force myself to stop reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. There is a fight scene involving bagels which still makes me laugh just thinking about it. In successive stages Alan Spence’s The Magic Flute, Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still convinced me that I could connect to Scotland as a place, that I could love it and write about it. Mercy Oceans Book Two by Mevlana Sheikh Nazim Adil Al‑Haqqani An-Naqshband made me understand what I was yearning for. When I first moved from Sudan to Scotland in my mid-20s, I was homesick and troubled. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born are just as powerful as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, if not more. The young woman from a warmer climate pushing her way through a baffling Britain, the wretchedness and vulnerability of being an outsider written simply and transparently – it haunts everything I write.

A voyage in the dark