Category Archives: The Books That Changed Me.

ROMANTIC FICTION MATTERS

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To launch Frost magazine’s support for #RespectRomFic, Sara-Jade Virtue, Brand Development Director, Fiction, for Simon & Schuster UK explains why the campaign is important and reveals her favourite romance books.

There is NOTHING I enjoy as much as a Big Love Story. Preferably on the page rather than on a screen, whether the love is of the romantic, familial or friendship kind, I adore j’adore and have done all my adult life.

Which is why I feel so passionate (no pun intended) about the #RespectRomFic movement I’m leading, and why it’s so important to me. For far too long the contribution to the literary landscape of the books written by the authors writing in the Romance & Saga space has been at best ignored, at worst dismissed. And yet these are the books that dig into the very heart (every pun intended) of the human condition, love. Love is what makes the world go round and these ten novels from my all time favourite dessert island reads list, show love in all its glorious forms – escapist, romantic, heart-warming, heart-breaking, laugh out loud funny, moving, poignant and painful.

Lily and the Octopus (Steven Rowley) – a heart-breaking, charming and unforgettable novel about life, love and long walks.

These Days of Ours (Juliet Ashton) – a gloriously irresistible romance about what happens when the person you love can’t be yours.

Letters to the Lost (Iona Grey) – a poignant, absorbing and tender story of love and loss.

Together (Julie Cohen) – a bold, breath-taking and compelling love story that manages to be as complex as it is compelling.

Rescue Me (Sarra Manning) – heartfelt, funny and wonderfully uplifting, this is total joy from start to finish.

The Last Letter From Your Lover (Jojo Moyes) – passion, loss and romance, and arguably in my Top 3 Favourite Novels Of All Time.

Seven Days in June (Tia Williams) – an extraordinary novel that manages to be both utterly hilarious and completely heart-breaking.

The Photographer of the Lost (Caroline Scott) – a vivid story of forbidden love and longing, this took my breath away.

When We Were Young (Richard Roper) – incredibly moving, hilariously funny, utterly heart-breaking.

The Man I Think I Know (Mike Gayle) – redemption, love, trust and second chances. Incredibly moving, funny and clever.

The stats back up the importance of romantic fiction too – here are some figures taken from publishing industry bible, The Bookseller, with the numbers provided by Nielson.

In 2022 Romance & Sagas had its second best year ever at £53m, only bettered by the Fifty Shades bonanza of 2012 (£68.3m).

This is way up from the more normal value of £25m, which is still seriously significant in terms of the market as a whole.

These figures exclude love stories coded as General & Literary Fiction, for example Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (£2m), Marian Keyes’ Again Rachel (almost £1m), Elena Armas’ The Spanish Love Deception (£851k) and Beth O’Leary’s The Road Trip (£459k).

The Sunday Times bestseller list has no category for romance, yet in 2022 the top twenty contained no fewer than six books that could be regarded as romantic fiction; four by Colleen Hoover, including the top selling novel of all, It Ends with Us, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley.

 

 

 

5 Books that Changed Me KM Kelly

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  1. 1.Nightfall 1 by Isaac Asimov

 

This volume of short stories by Isaac Asimov opens with perhaps his most famous, Nightfall, the story that started his career. My father had bought it and left it lying around and I picked it up and started to read. I was perhaps eleven at the time. Up until that point I had read only children’s books, but the stories in those pages introduced me, quite literally, to two new worlds – the world of adult literature and the world of science fiction. This marked a transition for me as a reader, from children’s fiction to adult fiction and I don’t think I ever looked back.

 

  1. 1.The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

 

This is a pivotal book for me because it steered the way for my future career in oceanography. Reading science fiction had already instilled in me a fascination for science, but this story led me to the sea. In many ways it is a book ahead of its time. An alien intelligence is melting Earth’s icecaps and the descriptions of the impact on our drowning world are both powerful and, in many ways, prophetic. Only we don’t need any alien influences to melt the icecaps. We’re managing that all on our own.

 

  1. 1.Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

 

This is the novel that first introduced me to the thriller genre, but the added fascination for me was the Dorset setting. An area I know all too well. I still get a thrill when I’m out exploring and I walk along one of the Holloways and I think of the un-named character hiding out in such a place. It’s an exciting story of pursuit and survival, one man against the odds.

 

  1. 1.The Last Days of Pompeii by Lord Lytton

 

Whenever people saw me reading this they would say “Ah, I know how it ends.” But it is this knowledge that adds to the brooding sense of foreboding. I read this before I actually visited Pompeii, saw it for myself, walked the streets, visited the villas and saw the bodies described in the novel. I loved the way the people of that ill-fated city had been brought to life by this book. I visited Pompeii during my honeymoon which was a turning point in my life and Lytton’s novel will always be part of that.

 

  1. 1.Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

 

This is a book that I should have read a long time ago, but somehow it slipped through the cracks. Then I started researching my family history and came to my Antiguan Great Grandfather, Ernest. I had always suspected that his story was an interesting one and when my DNA showed up a cluster of West African countries – something I suspected but never knew for sure – I realised I had to know more about this part of my heritage. Research is slow because records are sparse and to try to learn more about where Ernest came from I sought out literature. That was when I realised I had never read this book. I soon put that right. It’s a powerful story of passion and not truly belonging, feminism and post-colonialism, written as a backstory for Mr Rochester’s first wife. I can see why people say it is such an important book.

 

Buy The Sleepers by K M Kelly here

Sheila O’Flanagan Five Books That Changed Me.

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THE JEEVES OMNIBUS by PG Wodehouse

I’d always loved the look of the hardback books on my father’s shelf, but was aware that they were for grown-ups and I was only ten. But one day, having finished all the adventure books I’d borrowed from the library, I decided I’d have a crack at this. I chose it because I loved the art-deco cover and because I had to look up the word Omnibus in the dictionary. I also had to look up words like valet and feudal, but despite not having the faintest idea of how the British upper class lived, I was absolutely enraptured by the wit and humour of the writing. PG Wodehouse is still my go-to author when I need my spirits to be raised, and when I need to be reminded that English is a language rich in vocabulary and nuance. The Jeeves Omnibus marked my transition from children’s books to books for adults, and my appreciation of elegant, flowing language in the written word. After reading it, I insisted on borrowing every single PG Wodehouse book in the library.

PRINCESS DAISY by Judith Kranz

Most of the books I read during my teens and early twenties were American literary novels by writers like Steinbeck, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. There was a part of me that believed reading for pleasure was somehow a lesser pursuit, and that unless a book was reviewed as a worthy classic, I shouldn’t really be wasting time on it. And then I picked up Princess Daisy in the airport on my way to my first holiday abroad. I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but it had a heroine you could root for, as well as buckets of glamour and larger-than-life characters, and it was an absolute page turner. I’d never been gripped by a novel in quite this way before, and even though the book got some scathing reviews, I loved how invested I was in it. It made me realise that my view of ‘good writing’ was limited by a literary concept of what that should be, and that good storytelling was equally important.

LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE by Maeve Binchy

This novel centres around the relationship between to lifelong friends. During WW2, Elizabeth is evacuated from London to stay with Aisling’s family in Ireland, and even when she returns to England the two girls remain friends. Like many Irish people, we also had family in England who would come and stay with us every summer. My cousin and I, close in age, used to write each other long, detailed letters about our lives, hopes and dreams in the months when she was back in England. I saw this reflected in Light a Penny Candle, and it was probably the first time a novel actually mirrored part of my own life. Until then everything I read was about people very different to me. Now I realised that ordinary readers could see themselves in books too.

ANGELA’S ASHES by Frank McCourt

‘Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood’. McCourts memoir is a record of his miserable Irish Catholic childhood but it’s told with humour and empathy and, although my Irish Catholic childhood certainly didn’t match his for misery, it made me see that there are many different backgrounds and upbringings and many different stories to be told. Also, like Maeve Binchy, Frank McCourt was writing about Ireland. I’d always imagined that nobody would be interested in books set in Ireland but the location is irrelevant when the story is brilliantly told.

THE POWER by Naomi Alderman

So often in novels and in real life, the world view is set by men, and women are the bystanders, people to whom things happen, rather than people who make things happen. The Power turns this on its head and imagines a world in which women have a force within them with which they can dominate men. As I like to write novels with women front and centre, and shaping their own futures, I loved how this book ramped up the idea of how women could behave if they were physically superior to men. It asks lots of really interesting questions and forced me to think critically about power and how it’s both used and abused.

What Eden Did Next by Sheila O’Flanagan publishes 28th April 2022 in hardback, priced £20.00 (Headline Review)

Caroline Corcoran: Five Books That Changed my Life

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Nearly ten years ago, I started keeping a notebook of every book I read. It’s incredibly geeky, totally pointless (turns out no one has ever wanted to know what book I was reading at Christmas 2015) and I don’t care at all because I love it. 

five days missing , Caroline corcoran

I love being able to look back and see what I read when the Big Life Events happened (I literally have zero memory of the first book in there I read after giving birth. No idea what it is. Not even vaguely). It also means I can revisit and see sometimes what I didn’t see at the time: how the books I chose related to what was going on in my life at the time. Still, <changing> your life is a big ask. I believe books are up to the challenge though. Here are five that did it…

Dear Nobody, Bernie Doherty

Context: I was a very dramatic teenager. If I broke up with someone I went out with for two weeks, I listened to Lionel Richie on my walkman and wept. I kept endless diaries where I wrote my pretty mundane teenage existence into what I see now was the prototype of a novel. I was fascinated by – and still am fascinated by – the depiction of human emotion at its edges. Only one thing to do: seek out the true drama in fiction. I loved a book with heartbreak and chaos and teenagers suffering loss and pain and grief. God, I loved all of it. But I loved none of it like I loved Dear Nobody, where teenage Helen writes letters to the baby she is pregnant with. It was award-winning and groundbreaking and I must have read it fifty times, easily.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

“What do you like reading?” asked my then English teacher. I had moved on from that mega nineties shelf of joy in WH Smith – Judy Blume, The Babysitters Club, Saddle Club, every other club you can imagine etc – but I hadn’t figured out yet where to go next. She was a teacher that stayed with you, that English teacher, because she was the first person I had met (barring my chief book buddy Vic) who loved books like I did. Vic and I nodded in wonder when she passed on a list of recommendations to us for real grown up books (I could recite that list even now; it was a holy grail for me) and over the next few years, I read them all. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings though, was the first and the best. I read it over and over, and I read everything else I could get my hands on by Maya Angelou, this incredible, life-changing woman. She was the first author who showed me what books could do: enunciate thoughts you didn’t know you had, make sense of the world by telling the most vivid truth and teach you about – not to mention transport you to – worlds so far away from your own. More than anything though, Maya Angelou made me fall in love with the unrivalled, crazy beauty of words.

The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

Somebody pointed out to me recently when I posted about writing this piece that when people speak of books that changed their lives, they usually quote books they read in their teens and early twenties and I think they are right. All but one in this list, I read before I turned 25. I suspect that’s because those years are when we are forming ourselves and books – as well as music and film – help us to do this. They show us who we are, who we want to be and what possibilities there are in the world. I would go on to read so much more Margaret Atwood (and to stare at her like she was a pop star heartthrob when I saw her being interviewed once) but this one got under my skin and kick started something in me. 

Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn

I think this was the first proper psychological thriller I read and the start of me uncovering – unbeknown to me at the time – the genre I would eventually write myself. Unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, twists… I adored the whole, all-encompassing experience and after Gone Girl, I read back-to-back psychological thrillers with barely a break for much else for years. Many were brilliant, but this was the masterclass. I still hold Gone Girl up as that holy grail and the most annoying thing: the book I would have <loved> to have written myself. Grrr.

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Most of the time, my reading pattern is based on instinct: when I finish a book I know where I need to go next whether that’s a move to something gentler, contemporary, a classic, some short stories, something funny… Every now and again I read a book and all I know is that next I have to read <every single book that author has ever written>. It happened recently with Taylor Jenkins Reid after I read Daisy Jones and the Six, and I did the same with Tana French. But never has it been so mesmerising as it was in the summer of 2014 when I picked up a book I kept hearing about: Americanah. I barely came up for air. I’ve never read a love story like it; I’ve never felt such a strong sense of place, and I spent that summer hovering up everything else she had written. It tracked all the way back to Dear Nobody: I love reading (and writing) about human emotion, and nobody does it like the inimitable Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Five Days Missing is out 17 February (Avon, Harper Collins)

5 Books that Changed My Life By The Lucky Escape Author Laura Jane Williams

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The Babysitter’s Club series

My parents had a rule when we were growing up: they’d always say yes to a book. I remember being in Waterstone’s Durham and randomly pulling a Babysitter’s Club of off the shelf, purely to get my dad’s attention and praise. Turns out, it was a gateway drug. Over the next few years I collected all of them, devouring the stories of these incredibly glamourous Americans who essentially ran their own little business. Couple that with starting highs school as The Spice Girls hit number one and a lot of my personality suddenly makes sense!

lucky escape, Laura Jane Williams, books that changed me,

On Beauty, Zadie Smith

I read this when I was about 20, and it opened a secret door within me that I hadn’t known about before. Every character in this book leaps off the page – there is no such thing as a flat or incidental character, everyone is 3-D and complete. It was the first time I remember being aware of not just enjoying the story, but that the story was created by somebody, a writer, who had worked at it and used certain techniques and skills to make their point. I know every man and his dog has been inspired by Zadie, but it really is for a reason. She’s remarkable – she’s got the most smart, intelligent brain.

Heartburn, Nora Ephron

I’ve read and re-read this book, and every time I just cannot get over the self-awareness of it. It’s so funny. There’s not a line wasted. It’s no mean feat, writing a character with so much life in them, with strong opinions and questionable choices who is still utterly likeable. It’s the same for Bridget Jones. I love knowing that the novel is a roman a clef and picking out which bits are slightly less veiled retellings of actual events than others. It must only be about 50,000 words, if that, so it’s proof that not every story needs to be an opus to be impactful.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

This book taught me more about the lasting impact of slavery than anything else I’d ever read up until that point. I remember knowing that whilst the third chapter was some of the most difficult reading I’d come across it was unquestionably important. The novel branches out to illustrate the continued echoes of white supremacy alive today and so much clicked for me, then – my privilege had not allowed me to see so much, and through the gift of this story I could. It was a jumping off point for so much more interrogation into racial inequality.

Last Night, Mhairi McFarlane

I’d never read and Mhairi before this one, but offfft! What a book to get started on! Right from the first page I was sucked in to this world of banter and wholehearted friendship, and whilst I think the sort of rom-com/women’s fiction genre gets deliberately misunderstood (don’t get me started on that!) there’s no mistaking this book as an incisive, accomplished balance between hilarious and heart-breaking. That’s masterful! I read it in awe of her skill, trying to unpick how she’d done what she’d done. That’s how I know I’ve been impressed – I hold the thing up to the light desperate to learn from it!

 

The Lucky Escape publishing on the 10th June, is the third unmissable new novel from the bestselling author of Our Stop and The Love Square. The perfect romcom, and more: full of effortless banter; sizzling sexual tension and, above all, an overwhelming sense of hopefulness – in life as well as love.

THE BOOKS THAT CHANGED ME BY HÉLENE FERMONT 


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Ever since I was very young my parents instilled in me a love for literature. We had a big library room at the back of the house, with books by all kinds of authors, Swedish and international, filling the shelves. I distinctly recall my mother’s delight each time someone gave her a new book – she’d read and share it with the members of her book club. She went to great lengths preparing lovely delicious lunches and dressed up for the occasion. Back then, in the 80s, books were special and quite expensive. Some even impossible to get hold of. My parents queued up outside the biggest bookseller for hours on end one night in February every year to browse and buy new books by their favourite authors. They always bought new books for me and my brother and gave them to us on our birthdays. I still remember the excitement of reading a new book.
There are too many authors whose books I loved then, and regularly return to, to list here. My favourite books are the kind of books that linger in my heart and mind long after I’ve finished reading them. As the author of character driven Psychological Thrillers, and a huge fan of character focused books, the following books changed me and inspired me to write.

Loves Music Loves To Dance by Mary Higgins Clark
This book centres around personal ads, and was published before the Internet.
It highlights the dangers of meeting strangers and is a gripping story with great characters. I’ve read all her books and learn something new each time I return to them.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larson
After reading this intriguing and very graphic book, I became hooked on the sequels and, of course, the wonderful complex main character and storyline.

Small Town Girl by LaVyrle Spencer
The storyline centres around a famous singer who returns home to look after her mother. The characters are so vivid, complex and human I instantly felt and feel as if they could be part of my life. I always return to this author’s books to inspire me.

Hamilton Beach by Linda Olsson
This is a very sad book about grief and the grieving process, and how loss affects us when we least expect it. The book is written from the main character’s point of view and perspective of what happened years ago and the place they used to love. The characters and emotional journeys are wonderful as is the beautiful scenery. This is a hard book to read but very relatable for people in a similar situation. The author’s books centre around universal topics and unexpected life changing events.

Yes Of Course It Hurts When Buds Are Breaking by Karin Boye
Karin Boye’s one of Sweden’s most famous author and poet. This is my favourite poem as it touches my heart in numerous ways.The words and sentiments are beautiful, very relatable and sad. I think of my beloved parents and all the wonderful times we had together. This was their favourite poem as well.

 

 

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: JAN BAYNHAM ON HER LOVE FOR UNDER MILK WOOD

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Those of you who know me or read my posts on Jan Baynham Writer Facebook page will realise I’m a big fan of Dylan Thomas and his writing, from his wonderful poetry to his short stories and especially his famous play for voices, Under Milk Wood. My first encounter with the play was, in fact, not on the radio but a stage performance at the tiny but grandly named theatre, the Albert Hall, in my hometown of Llandrindod Wells. As a teenager, I can remember being mesmerised by the poetic language, his use of imagery, and the wide range of eclectic and eccentric people he’d created.

The characters live in a small fictional Welsh village by the sea, named Llareggub (read it backwards!) or Llaregyb (contrary to Thomas’s wishes) in some earlier versions of the play. A long time in its making, the play tells of the ‘dreams, fantasies and realities of the inhabitants’ of Llareggub ‘as they unfold across the cycle of one spring day’. The villagers are presented in a humorous, ribald way, created and exaggerated maybe from the poet’s observations of the oddities and the pieces of gossip of a small-town community that he lapped up every morning in Brown’s Hotel in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.

The play opens at night and a narrator invites the audience to listen in on the dreams of the townspeople of Llareggub while they sleep, “from where you are”.

“To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea…”

We are taken straight there, invited to listen to the villagers’ innermost thoughts. They include Captain Cat, the blind sea captain, reliving his times at sea and his drowned ship mates and Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, relentlessly nagging her two dead husbands. Almost all the characters in the play are introduced as the audience witnesses a moment of their dreams until “…dawn inches up.”

Through the characters, more than sixty of them, we are given a glimpse of village life albeit through their eccentricities. The Reverend Eli Jenkins delivers a morning sermon about his love for the village. I love the choice of names – Gossamer Beynon, Willy Nilly, Evans the Death, Dai Bread, Nogood Boyo. Through their actions and what they say, the characters come alive. Taking up her morning tea, Mr. Pugh imagines poisoning his nagging wife and whispers:

“Here’s your arsenic, dear.
And your weedkiller biscuit…
Here’s your…
…nice tea, dear.”

At Mrs. Organ-Morgan’s general shop, women gossip about the townspeople. Children play in the schoolyard; Polly Garter scrubs floors and sings about her illicit lovers of the past. Later, Mrs. Organ-Morgan shares some of that gossip with her husband:

“I saw you talking to a saint this morning. Saint Polly Garter. She was martyred again last night…”

As night begins, Reverend Jenkins recites another poem. Cherry Owen heads to the Sailor’s Arms, where Sinbad still longs for Gossamer Beynon. The town prepares for the evening and the inhabitants of Llareggub return to their dreams again.

Since my first introduction to Under Milk Wood as a teen, I’ve heard it played many times with a variety of casts, seen stage performances and film versions. It never fails to intrigue me, and I find new snippets of language to marvel at each time. It has been called poetry but Dylan Thomas’s own description of it is ‘prose with blood-pressure’! If you are not familiar with the play, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

 

 

 

 

The Books That Have Changed Me – by Award Winning Author Dr Kathleen Thompson

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Books are powerful aren’t they? They give instant access to great minds from numerous centuries, experiences beyond our reach and limitless knowledge. 

As a doctor I find psychology fascinating, and thought manipulation, together with the powerful instincts driving human behaviour. So naturally George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four influenced me tremendously. Having volunteered for the Spanish Civil War, Orwell saw first-hand how politics and power-wrangles ultimately controlled and re-wrote history. His experience when the faction he had been fighting for was made the convenient scape-goat for the emerging winners was surely a major inspiration for his books, and through sharing his insights, he made me aware of the lies and mind games we are exposed to every day – sadly often from mainstream media. 

Black Box Thinking by Matthew Syed explores fascinating aspects of the human psyche too – such as why even educated intelligent people will cling to a blatantly false belief – because being proved wrong is more intolerable than most people realise. He warns of the ubiquity of false memory and the dangers this poses when relying on crime witnesses. Interesting for me, he also explores ‘blame culture’ and how it often leads medical errors to be suppressed, thus losing the opportunities to learn from them, in contrast with the more open investigations of aviation disasters.

Also dealing with the psyche, a book I reviewed for Frost – Offline explains how social media utilises our brains’ release of dopamine – the pleasure/addiction hormone, to draw us in, and how our views and perceptions can be, and are, manipulated using simple psychological principles. This important read continues to influence how I use social media.

My daughter introduced me to Japanese Manga. I particularly love The Drops of God – how a famous wine expert posthumously encourages his estranged son to learn about fine wines – and guess what? You learn too as you read – what would you like to know about Margaux, Amarone, Dom Perignon? It’s all in the story and I know a lot more about fine wines now than I did. I just need to work out how to afford some of them – maybe another book will help with that?

When I found myself struggling with breast cancer, I knew I had to write a book to help others who didn’t have my medical knowledge. But how to write a book? I had no idea. Eventually I discovered The Writer’s Springboard: An Exploration of the Essentials of Fiction Writing by Margaret Graham – and at the other end of it – the guru herself.  Through this book, and her tutorials, Margaret gave me the tools to write my book, which definitely changed my life in so many ways.

But I can’t mention Margaret Graham without commenting on her incredible list of novels – under both her own name and her pen-names, Millie Adams and Annie Clarke. Margaret is a best-selling author because she sucks you in. You don’t read, you experience. She hasn’t worked in a coal mine, or braved the dreadful cold on a canal boat, or built her home from scratch in the Australian out-back, or struggled in the middle of a war-zone (well actually … but that’s another story) – but she has that talent of making you feel the experience. So now I feel like I’ve done all these things too – and these ‘experiences’, albeit from the comfort of the sofa, inevitably change one, don’t you think?

So what books changed your life?

By Dr K Thompson, award-winning author of From Both Ends of the Stethoscope: Getting through breast cancer – by a doctor who knows

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01A7DM42Q http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01A7DM42Q

http://faitobooks.co.uk

Note: These articles express personal views. No warranty is made as to the accuracy or completeness of information given and you should always consult a doctor if you need medical advice.