Which book do you think author Tracy Chevalier found ‘cold and self-absorbed’?

What Book… 

Tracy Chevalier’s new book, The Glassmaker, is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

…are you reading now? 

I’m reading Miss Buncle’s Book by D.E. Stevenson. I’m on holiday and was looking for something light, entertaining and well written. 

It was originally published in 1934, and is about a woman living in a small village who writes a novel about it in order to bring in some income. This of course ruffles quite a few feathers.

It’s very funny, in a chuckling rather than a guffawing sort of way. Stevenson brilliantly captures village life, with its eccentric characters and petty squabbles. 

It has been republished by the wonderful Persephone Books, a publisher with a great nose for sniffing out lost classics – especially by women. 

…would you take to a desert island? 

By definition a desert island book has to be big, otherwise what’s the point? So it has to be Tolstoy’s War And Peace. I avoided reading it until a few years ago, put off by its bad press – too long, too much war, and so many characters you need a character list at the front.

What nonsense; grow up, readers! It’s a great book, full of drama, gossip, romance and fully drawn characters. I found it so entertaining, with wonderful set pieces both at parties and on the battlefields. There is a moment I’ll never forget, when Pierre sits on a hillside and watches a battle as if he’s at the theatre – and then gets drawn onstage. Astonishing.

…first gave you the reading bug? 

The Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

This is a series of children’s novels, beginning with Little House In The Big Woods, that follows a pioneer family as they gradually move West from Wisconsin to South Dakota. They contend with bears, locusts, drought, failed crops, blizzards and the tension between settlers and the Native Americans they had displaced. As a girl I related to Laura, the spirited, quick-tempered heroine. Once I read the first book, I gobbled down the remaining eight. I still have them in my study.

…left you cold? 

I really can’t be getting on with Rachel Cusk and other autofiction writers. I managed to get through Cusk’s Outline, just, but a cold, self-absorbed wind blows through it that put me right off. I like plot, and I like to care about what happens to characters (though I don’t have to like them). This had neither. I think writing novels based on your own life means you have very little perspective on what will be of interest to readers. Writers need to be ruthless; otherwise it’s self-indulgence. 

THE Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier (The Borough Press, £20) is out now.