Books in conversation
Six invitations to read across a writing life: books Ros has loved, writers she has returned to, and the affinities they reveal in her own work.
A direct connection
Read alongside
Ros names Woolf as her favourite author and this novel among her favourite books. Her own study looks closely at how Virginia Stephen became the writer Virginia Woolf.
A direct connection
Read alongside
Ros has said she had always loved Alain-Fournier’s novel. Learning that he was writing another book when he went to war helped set her own novel in motion.
From Ros’s reading shelf
Read alongside
Ros calls Howard’s book one of the most acute and disturbing novels about a marriage she has read. Read it beside her own clear-eyed account of a marriage reaching crisis.
A direct connection
Read alongside
Bishop’s exacting attention to Key West, its light, beauty and strangeness, runs in close company with Ros’s stories of island lives gathered across thirty years.
From Ros’s reading shelf
Read alongside
Ros lists Ondaatje’s novel among her favourite books. Its layers of memory and hidden history make an illuminating companion to her Paris story of art, family and discovery.
From Ros’s reading shelf
Read alongside
Another of Ros’s named favourites, Michaels’s novel asks how buried histories remain present. That question echoes through Nessa’s return to a coast where the past has quite literally surfaced.
A living shelf
These pairings draw on Ros’s published interviews, author profile and reading notes. They are a starting shelf rather than a definitive list of influences.