My Life In Books: Emma Donoghue

What are you reading right now?

Over breakfast (so it doesn’t stop me from sleeping), I’m reading Yuval Noah Harari’s lucid, eloquent and terrifying Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. By day, I’m reading highly specific studies of World War One trench warfare for something I’m writing and, by night, I’m relaxing with Kate Atkinson’s Death at the Sign of the Rook, the latest of her inimitably flavourful murder mysteries.

What book from childhood will always stay with you?

The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles, a fascinating fantasy by Julie Edwards, better known as Mary Poppins herself, Dame Julie Andrews.

What books made you want to write?

The Narnia series. That image at the start of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when the children are looking at a painting of a sailing ship and next thing they’re sucked right into the water – that’s the kind of power I wanted to have over readers.

When and where do you read?

Any time I have more than ten seconds free, anywhere I can whip out the latest New Yorker or open my phone.

Where do you buy books?

I buy paper copies of books I have on my to-read list, online, from book chains (but NOT the obvious ones). I buy others, on impulse, from independent bookshops. I buy ebooks to read on my phone when I need something specific urgently.

Do you belong to a book club?

Yes, we’re called The Furies and, to be honest, we’re as much potluck as book club, but complaining ‘WHICH of you picked this book?’ is a key part of the evening.

How do you choose what to read?

I read reviews and keep a very long list. When friends recommend titles, I bump those ones up to the top and buy them sooner.

Do you have a favourite author?

No, but I’ll buy, say, Roddy Doyle or Ann-Marie MacDonald or Jane Smiley in hardback because I can’t wait for the paperback.

What's been your favourite read of 2025 so far?

Rebecca Makkai’s unnerving murder story, I Have Some Questions For You. By combining the 19th-century genre of the school story with the 21st-century form of the true-crime podcast, and using and bending the conventions of both so wittily, Makkai has come up with something memorably new, and I love how the adult detective’s own history at the school complicates her relationship to it.

What one novel will always stay with you?

Great Expectations, partly because I think it’s Dickens’s best and partly because the Irish school system made me study it for three years in my teens.

Favourite biography?

Not quite sure it counts, strictly speaking, but I loved Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography for its quirky and personal approach.

Favourite non-fiction book?

No question about it: Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. I follow her blog, too; she keeps an eagle eye out for governments, companies and scientists who fail to disaggregate their data by sex and gender, which has created a world in which (to pick just one notorious example) women are far more likely to die in car crashes than men. 

Do you read poetry?

Sigh… I should. I’m a lapsed poetry fan. My speedy reading gets in the way.

What book would you give as a gift?

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, to an adult who doesn’t think ‘children’s lit’ is for them.

What was the last book that made you cry?

Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits, an incredibly moving prison-theatre story set in a Sicilian quarry in 412BC. Lennon’s bold decision to have his characters speak in the relaxed vernacular of his Irish homeland lets him skip over the difficulty of finding a plausible English for people speaking other languages, thousands of years ago, and it also sets up some really interesting echoes between then and there and now and here. 

Any recommendations for laugh out loud books?

Stella Gibbons’s 1932 parody, Cold Comfort Farm. A girlfriend read it to me when I was sick with the flu many decades ago, and I laughed so much at Gibbons’s rural-melodrama tropes that I thought I’d choke.

What’s your favourite film or TV adaptation of a book?

The HBO series of Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic Station Eleven.

Are there any books that have helped you through difficult times?

Emily Dickinson’s collected poetry was the strangely comforting touchstone of my 1980s Irish closeted adolescence.

Favourite literary character?

Jeeves, the all-knowing but ever-tactful valet in PG Wodehouse’s series.

What one book should everybody read in their lifetime?

Romeo and Juliet is an exemplary account of coming to terms with the ‘other’ and why you shouldn’t freak out when your daughter brings them home. Some of Shakespeare’s plays can be, dare I say it, baggy, but when I saw Romeo and Juliet recently, I was struck by its tight structure and pacing – every scene is a cog in the fast-moving machine of the single plot. The alternating scenes between the two tribes makes you divide your sympathies between them and realise that they all share the same human concerns.

Do you have a favourite book of all time?

Grimm’s Fairytales contains the whole world, and all those plots were honed by being passed down orally for centuries.

Finally, please feel free to tell us what you’re working on at the moment…

My latest novel, The Paris Express will be published in the UK by Picador on 20th March.

Follow Emma on Instagram @E_Donoghue; her new book The Paris Express is available to order here.