The art of discovering a favourite book by Jessica Harrison, Publishing Director of Penguin Classics. How do you choose a favourite book? Is it the novel you discovered as a teenager, which opened your eyes in a thrilling new way to the world around you? Is it the book you completely lost yourself in, which relegated everything else around you to a vague background hum? Or is it your ultimate comfort read, the literary equivalent of a nice cup of …
Category: Fiction
Caoimhe in our Cork store reflects on the books that have shaped her… In May 2015, I was 15 years old and although I did not yet recognize my own …
Memories collide to create the inspiration for The Museum of Lost Umbrellas Back in 2020 I woke up one morning with a dream still swimming in my head: an isolated …
Usually when asked where my inspiration comes from, I tend to say that it begins with character. But The Night I Killed Him started with a location – specifically the …
I think that anybody who has ever worked in a shop has been granted a perspective on the world that is unique. A secret code understood only by those of …
It Should Have Been You is about a woman named Susan who writes a mean, gossipy message to her sisters all about a neighbour, Celeste, who gets on her nerves. …
The Kindness of Strangers. In an increasingly volatile world, I’ve been thinking about kindness. What does it mean? And why is it important. My new novel, Two Kinds of Stranger, …
When I began writing Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way, I returned to characters I had already spent time with. Claire and Tom first appeared in a short …
Three years ago, I began an unusual project. I decided to write four novellas, each 40,000 words long, based around the traditional building blocks of the universe – water, earth, …
I wrote The Names because I’ve always been fascinated by the things that shape us as people. Our upbringing, our circumstances, the interests we’re steered toward, the people we cross …
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