Incredible Authors On The Book That Means The Most To Them

“I will never forget reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It was 2012, I was living in Ghana as West Africa correspondent for [British newspaper] The Guardian. I had founded the newspaper’s bureau in a spare room in my house. That house was tiled and pleasant, with a magical garden and fragrant air. But it was also beset with shortages of water and power, our unreliable air-conditioning the only thin veil between the productive order I was trying to police inside and the chaotic heat outside. As I bashed away at the relentless challenge of trying to cover around 20 African countries from this tenuous perch, I was also raising my newborn daughter, and making sense of why I was there. I may have been on a professional journey as a journalist, but I was on an emotional journey, too – reconnecting with the land of my ancestors and a heritage interrupted by centuries of colonialism.

“I picked up Americanah seeking an escape from this intensity. But what I found was a fictional world of characters who felt so real. I already knew Adichie was an astonishing storyteller, having read her previous books Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. But this was the first time I had ever seen characters I knew so well brought to life. The web of love and searching she creates in that book takes the protagonists from Nigeria to the UK and America, and was more than a story – it was a phenomenon. It was the first time I read a book by a stranger and felt that I had been seen. I didn’t know how much I had longed for that – until I read that book.”

Afua Hirsch is a writer, broadcaster and the author of Decolonising My Body: A Radical Exploration of Rituals and Beauty

“I would swear that the book most-meaningful – and most-read – in my life is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. A novel set in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, that tells the tale of a young, Black, dark-skinned girl’s identity; it’s a novel tied up in abuse, in disassociation, and in and across the landscape of pain and longing. The book’s main character, Pecola Breedlove, wants desperately to be anyone else and, most importantly, look like anyone else. But it’s not the novel that I love the most. It’s what Morrison was saying. It’s that the book was banned. It’s that readers found the contents controversial, that they didn’t think that Morrison should have written about abuse in the Black community. In response, Morrison said: ‘I felt compelled to write this mostly because, in the 1960s, most of what was being published by Black men [was] very powerful, aggressive, revolutionary fiction or non-fiction – and [these publications] had a very positive racially uplifting rhetoric… and I thought they would skip over something and thought no one would remember that [Black] wasn’t always beautiful.’ But, to me, The Bluest Eye is beautiful. As beautiful as it is brave, bold and painful. And that’s where the most meaningful parts of life are; in the bits nobody wants to talk about.”

Candice Carty-Williams is the author of Queenie and People Person

“The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin was the first sci-book I’d ever read by a Black author, and it fundamentally altered my understanding of the genre. In the year prior to reading it, I had embarked on writing my first novel, and I felt unmoored from a lineage of writers. Jemisin’s work taught me that to create new worlds doesn’t mean disregarding personhood and heart. Her characters are so alive for me that they live in my dreams – and sometimes in my nightmares. Four years on from having read her work, I now write with the ambition of tracing some faint memory of her stories into my own. She is a genius who will be remembered as such, and I feel so lucky to live in the same era as her.”

Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff is a journalist, writer and editor of books that include Black Joy and Mother Country

“Toni Morrison’s writing remains unparalleled to me – she’s been one of my favorite authors since my late teens; but different books resonate more with me at different times in my life. I recently read Sula again – which, upon reading for perhaps the third time, at this stage in my life, I enjoyed much more than I had during previous readings! Her exploration of the layers and complications of an intense female friendship against the backdrop of a rural segregated America is so rich, and her writing just so infused with magic; mythical, strange and often unexpectedly sinister. It’s simply incomparable work.”

Emma Dabiri is a journalist and the author of What White People Can Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition and Don’t Touch My Hair