Below are some of the books that opened the door for me during the years I was writing the stories in Open Up. The list is also available on bookshop.org.

These texts were like flashes of lightning on a dark night, illuminating inner landscapes that had previously remained hidden to me. If there is a connecting thread between the books – some quality that they all share beyond my having read them – it’s maybe best expressed by a quotation from Clarice Lispector’s ‘Hour of the Star’, which I’ve used as the epigraph for Open Up:

‘The facts are sonorous but between there’s a whispering. It’s the whispering that astounds me.’

Novels

Clarice Lispector – Hour of the Star

Franz Kafka – The Trial

Tarjei Vesaas – The Ice Palace

Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway

Yiyun Li – Where Reasons End

William Maxwell – They Came Like Swallows

Sally Rooney – Normal People

James Baldwin – Go Tell It On The Mountain

Michael Magee – Close To Home

Tove Ditlevsen – Copenhagen trilogy

Anaïs Nin – A Spy In The House of Love

Peter Handke – The Left–Handed Woman

Gabriel García Márquez – No One Writes To The Colonel

Muriel Spark – The Driver’s Seat

John McGahern – The Leavetaking

Georg Büchner – Lenz

Samuel Beckett – First Love and other Novellas

Jean Rhys – Good Morning, Midnight

B.S. Johnson – The Unfortunates

Gwendoline Riley – First Love

Rachel Cusk – Outline

Jenny Offill – Dept. Of Speculation

Chetna Maroo – Western Lane

Stories

Eudora Welty – Collected Stories

Julio Cortazar – Collected Stories

Anton Chekhov – Selected Stories

Leonora Carrington – The Debutante and Other Stories

Shirley Jackson – Dark Tales

Janet Frame – Collected Stories

Italo Calvino – Cosmicomics

Lucia Berlin – A Manual for Cleaning Women

Claire-Louise Bennett – Pond

Ralph Ellison – Selected Stories

April Ayers Lawson – Virgin and Other Stories

Sarah Hall – Madame Zero

Wendy Erskine – Sweet Home

Amina Cain – Creature

Alejandro Zambra – My Documents

Non-fiction

Nell Dunn – Talking To Women

Gabor Maté – When The Body Says No

Janet Malcolm – The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Carl Rogers – On Becoming a Person

Amia Srinivasan – The Right To Sex

R.D. Laing & Aaron Esterson – Sanity, Madness and the Family

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir – Scarcity

John Berger – Ways of Seeing

Sheila Heti – Motherhood

Edouard Louis – Who Killed My Father

Hitchcock/Truffaut – François Truffaut

Poetry

Frank O’Hara – Meditations in an Emergency

Stephen Sexton – If All The World And Love Were Young

Reviews/articles/essays

Nicole Flattery, review of A Shock by Keith Ridgway

Adam Philips, Against Self-Criticism

Elif Batuman, ‘Céline Sciamma’s Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema’