Hi my name is Megan Nolan and I'm the author of Acts of Desperation and my second novel,
Ordinary Human Failings is coming out on the 13th of July. Ordinary Human Feelings begins
with ambitious tabloid journalist named Tom who gets wind of a tragedy that's happened
on a council estate in London. The year is 1990 and a child has been found dead, another child
is suspected of having something to do with the crime. And Tom gets to know a little bit about
this family who are reclusive Irish family who moved to England about 10 years prior. Tom then
approaches the family and offers to put them up in a hotel with limitless alcohol, some pocket money,
so long as he can keep them as a source on tap just for his newspaper. This then leads to a very
high pressure environment where this family who have become very estranged from one another over
the years are kept in a hotel together, while Tom tries to uncover their secrets, which he
believes may have led to the death of this young child. Although it's sort of set around a crime
and based around this pivotal incident mostly I consider it to be a portrait of this family,
the Greens, and we go back in time with them into their past in Ireland and try to figure
out why they've become so silent and so removed from one another and try to understand how this
unhappiness is spread through the generations. And the family really stuck with me for the
last three years and I care a lot about all of them and I really hope everyone else does too.
So I'm here at Waterstone's Piccadilly and I've chosen three books that are my favorites and have
influenced some of my writing. My first choice is Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham and this
I read when I was about 15 and it was one of my first big kind of birth to death full-life
novels that really stuck with me in the kind of Dickensian mode. This one is about Philip Carey
who's orphaned when we meet him at the beginning of the book and we see him move to Germany,
to Paris, to become an artist where he falls in love with the waitress called Mildred. And
this I think is the real core of it for me, he has this very abject love story with Mildred
where he becomes very pathetic and very, not just obsessed, but kind of completely at her
disposal at all times, no matter how much she rejects him. And I find it kind of moving in
a way that someone has this total sacrifice even when it's not very glamorous or well repaid and,
yep just a wonderful big big long birth to death novel that I love.
I'm now here in the crime section and I've chosen for my second bookIn The Cut by Suzanne
Moore. In The Cut came out in 1995 and it was a very shocking departure for Suzanne
Moore who had at this point written three I think novels that were quite family-based and
a little bit more sedate than this one which is very sexual and very violent. And she has said,
which I found very interesting and inspiring in my own work, that she decided to kind of make a
departure from being a women's writer and write a Noir, which was an intentionally male sort of
genre that she wanted to crack into. It's about a woman called Franny who's an English teacher
who happens across a sexual act taking place in the bottom of a nightclub and then the person
she sees there turns out to be a detective who's investigating a really brutal murder
in her neighbourhood. She then begins a sort of very troubled, dark affair with him as she
begins to suspect he might be responsible for this crime. So it's very, very intense, very graphic,
but absolutely brilliantly written and yeah just a real shocking but incredible book that I love.
And for my final pick I've chosen A Man in Love by Karl One Knausgaard. He's a writer who's been very
important to me over the last 10 years or so and this book is the second of the six that he wrote,
of the six My Struggle books, And this one is, it kind of goes into his marriage initially and
his experience of being a new father but then quite brutally goes into him falling in love
with another woman and leaving his wife. And I think that's the part, it's about lots of other
things as well, but that's the part that really stuck with me, is his sort of abjection and shame
when he's falling in love with this new person who initially doesn't really respond to his advances
and he's not even feeling the shame about leaving his wife, but also about being sort of rebuffed by
this new woman. And there's this really incredible scene where he's at a literary festival with her
and then is rejected and is so filled with horror at his rejection that he cuts his face with a
piece of glass and has to go down and face her and all the other writers the next morning. And
it's just this scene of total desolation that really stuck with me over the years
and yeah, just also very funny at times about masculinity. There's some things where he's, you
know, a bit ashamed of wielding his babies around in prams because it's too feminine and there's a
wheelie suitcase at one point that he has to carry upright because it's too weak to be wheeling it
around town. So yeah, very dark, but also very funny and yeah one of my favourite writers ever.