“If you could leave three books Rachel hamilton...was a psychiatrist and psychothera-pist. His wisdom and insight shine through, right from the opening line. To summarise: ‘Life

11 april 201418 khaleejtimes.com/wknd khaleejtimes.com/wknd 11 april 2014 19

Read On LITERARY LOVE

COMIC EXPLOSIONRachel’s children’s

detective story (pictured above) is

available for pre-order from

Amazon and iTunes

And whO bETTER TO Ask — In ThIs AgE Of dwIndLIng REAdIng skILLs — ThAn fIVE AuThORs, ALL EsTAbLIshEd In ThEIR Own RIghT?

bY kAREn Ann MOnsY

“If you could leave three books for your kids when you die,

which would they be — and why?”

Rachel hamiltonA graduate of both Oxford University and Cambridge University, the Dubai-based British-American author has put her education to good use by working in an advertising agency, a comprehen-sive school, and a men’s prison. She developed a passion for storytelling as a long-suffering English teacher, when she discovered it was the best way to get her students to sit down and listen. After winning a prize in the Monte-grappa First Fiction Competition at the 2013 Emirates Airline Festival of Litera-ture, Rachel received an offer of repre-sentation by London agent Luigi Bono-mi, followed by a two-book deal with Simon and Schuster for her humorous children’s book The Case of the Explod-ing Loo, and a sequel.

“I don’t fancy dying, and I’d miss my kids, so I’m tempted to leave Raising the Dead and Speaking to

the Dead with Radios. But I’ll behave myself and answer properly.

To cheer the kids up after my tragic end, I’d leave a book that always makes me laugh — The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend. Utterly British and unremittingly hila-rious, the book follows neurotic, unfor-tunate Mole through the early 1980s as he writes frankly about his parents’ marriage, the Royal Wedding and life as a self-described ‘intellectual’. Read it and laugh, kids.

Despite my demise, I’d want to enc-ourage my kids to stay silly in a world

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where even the ‘fun’ stuff often involves some kind of goal or educa-tional opportunity. So I’d leave my favourite Roald Dahl book, Matilda, a brilliantly bonkers tale of a smart but lonely five-year-old who can move things with her eyes. Matilda uses her powers to wreak revenge on her neglec-tful parents and terrible headmistress and offers valuable advice for children everywhere: “Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so complete-ly crazy it’s unbelievable.”

But this list would be incomplete without my favourite book — Diana Wynne-Jones’ Howl’s Moving Castle —

the story of 18-year-old Sophie who’s transformed into an old lady by the Wicked Witch of the Waste and ends up cleaning for Howl, a flamboyant wizard, notorious for eating young women’s hearts. Witty, wise and full of magic, this book would show my kids heroines don’t have to be beautiful and agreeable — Sophie is stubborn and fiercely argu-mentative — and heroes can’t always be Prince Charming. Howl is talented and adorable, but he’s also cowardly, vain and prone to the odd hissy fit.

Strange, hilarious and utterly perfect, Howl’s Moving Castle is the book I’d miss most after death. But maybe Speaking to the Dead with Radios would enable my kids to read it to me!



linDa DaVieSAn escaped investment banker, Linda is the author of several books — her most loved being the internationally best-selling Nest of Vipers (available as a physical and e-book on Amazon.com). Her Djinn Quintet, a series for young adults (aged 11 and up) is set in and around Dubai. In August this year, Linda will have two new books published: Ark Storm, a darkly ingenious story of a ter-rorist attack on the US using weather manipulation, and her first non-fiction book, Hostage, in which she relates the true story of her kidnap at sea and detainment in Iran.


Books are other worlds waiting at our fingertips. There are so many I love that I would wish my chil-

dren to read.I’ll start with poetry in which you can

find everything. One of my favourite anthologies is Other Men’s Flowers. Field Marshal Lord Wavell (1883-1950) was wounded at Ypres in the First World War and lost sight in one eye. A renowned and remarkable soldier, you can imagine him seeking the escape of poetry during the misery of the war. His selection is wide-ranging, from Christina Rossetti to Percy Shelley to William Blake to Hilaire Belloc to AE Housman and so many more. His arrangement is eccentric and beguiling — under sections like: Love and all that; The Call of the Wild; Good fighting; The Lighter Side… The whole world of human emotions is captured here.

I rarely read self-help books but M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled (the title is from a poem by Robert Frost) is exceptional. Peck (who died in 2005) was a psychiatrist and psychothera-pist. His wisdom and insight shine through, right from the opening line. To summarise: ‘Life is difficult. This is one of the greatest truths because once we see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult, then life no longer is difficult because the fact that it is difficult no longer matters. Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?’ Peck arms us with tools to solve these problems so that we might do it for ourselves.

One of my favourite novelists is the complex and brilliant Graham

Greene. And my most beloved of all his books has to be The Quiet American. It is a haunting and unsparing depiction of the callowness, cruelty and blind self-assurance of idealistic youth; a treatise against the politics of intervention and a portrait of the melancholia and bitter-sweetness of love, ageing and loss. Green’s epigrammatic characterisations make me bow down in awe. And he sums up and skewers the callousness of the politicospeak of collateral damage, which cares not about individuals but about generic concepts. He says of the quiet American: ‘He was determined — I learnt that very soon — to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.’ Every politician in every country of the world should be given a copy of The Quiet American and forced to read it.

KIDNAP!In 2005, Linda and her husband were

intercepted by two gunboats and held

prisoner for 13 days — a story she will tell

in Hostage, to be released this year

COuNty LOvE

Cornwall is the inspiration for all

three of Liz’s books, including A Cornish

Stranger, to be released this year

liZ FenWicKWriter, mother-of-three, and “dreamer turned doer”, Liz was born in Massa-chusetts and, after nine international moves, now lives in Dubai with her husband and two mad cats — Snowy and Sooty. She made her first trip to Cornwall in 1989, bought her home there seven years later and now has her heart set in the English county “for-ever”. Published in the UK, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Norway and Estonia, Liz’s third novel A Cornish Stranger, published by Orion, will be out in May this year.

My first book to them would be Easy French Country Classics by Michelle Garner. I’m not a pre-

cise cook-by-the-recipe type of person, but this book was given to me just after I was married. I used the recipes to develop what has become ‘my style’ of cooking. Over the years, I have jotted down changes, additions and totally off-the-wall ideas. In the blank pages at the front and back, I’ve written down the ‘family’ recipes that my mother passed on to me. Tucked within the pages are more recipes I have pulled from maga-zines and newspapers over the years. So contained in this one fat overstuffed book is ‘my cooking’ and my kids associ-ate me with good food. Besides, the best


family time is always over a meal, enjoy-ing the flavours and debating everything from which is the best Harry Potter book to what invention was the most impor-tant in the 20th century.

I’ve read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss so many times to my children, I can recite most of it by heart. We knew it so well that if I deliberately misread something, they corrected me! So I would want them to remember the hours of bedtime giggles and cuddles. I hope that they will continue the tradi-tion as my parents read it to me. There is something incredibly bonding about the sharing of stories from one genera-tion to the next.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho was a

book I read when I was 42. My brother-in-law had just finished reading it and told me I should read it too. The whole fable just clicked in my head and with what was happening in my life at the time. I was pursuing my dream of bec-oming a published writer in fiction. There were times on that journey that were hard — not just on me but on my kids too. My family supported me while I chased the elusive. I would love this book to fall into their hands at the time when following their dreams is hard and it seems that the universe isn’t helping. This book could remind them that it’s never too late go after your dreams as their mother proved by becoming a published author at 49.



eoin colFeREoin Colfer (pronounced Owen) was born in Ireland in 1965. He first developed an interest in writing in elementary school with gripping Viking stories inspired by history he was learning at the time. In 2001, the first Artemis Fowl book was published and Eoin was able to resign from teaching and concentrate fully on writing. The Artemis Fowl series has since

sold over 20 million copies world-wide and catapulted him into the internationally bestselling author that he is today. Eoin, who was in Dubai last month for the sixth Emirates Airline Festival of Litera-ture, has said he will keep writing “until people stop reading or [he runs] out of ideas” — neither of which, he hopes, will happen any-time soon!

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T reasure Island first! I would leave this Robert Louis Stevenson classic behind to demonstrate

just how good kids books can be and to get my kids hooked on reading. There is no chance that someone could read such a good book and then stop reading forever.

Then there’s Any Human Heart by William Boyd. I would hope that this book would help my boys understand the human conditions of loneliness, selfish-ness and, even, growing older. I would like them to see life through another person’s eyes and, hopefully, develop empathy for others that way.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has become an inspiration for me and almost like a ‘how to’ manual of sci-fi writing. Douglas Adams was the writer who showed me just how effective a tool comedy can be in any situation. It is because of him that I inject so much humour in my stories and because of him that I laughed so much with all my friends. I would love my children to exp-erience that joy and I envy them their first reading of the Hitchhiker.

FOR tHE BIG SCREEN

In July last year, Walt Disney Pictures

announced its interest in

producing an Artemis Fowl film

tRuE LIFERavinder’s books

are an adaptation of his own story, when his fiancée

died in 2007 before they could

be engaged

RaVinDeR SinghRavinder Singh is one of India’s best-selling authors. An alumnus of the prestigious Indian School of Business, he was in Dubai late last year for the 32nd Sharjah International Book Fair. After working in the IT sector for about eight years and with Fortune compa-nies like Microsoft, Ravinder Singh is now an entrepreneur. His new publish-ing venture BlackInk (www.blackink-books.in) is meant to provide the first break to debut authors. He is a motiva-tional speaker and is keen on using his skills to influence the youth of India for good.

While certainly I would want my kids — and, in fact, their kids too — to read my written books,

so that they know how their father (or grandfather) fell in love and how his childhood days were, I’m going to look to some other well-known authors and their books for this piece.

I’d love for my kids to read For One More Day by Mitch Albom. It is an interesting story in which a man hallu-cinates and sees his dead mother in front of him — for one more day. That

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day, his mother makes him understand why she had done, all that she had done to/for him while she was still alive. In reading this book, I would hope that my children would someday recall me!

Another must-read I’d say is A Walk to Remember by Nicholas Sparks. It is a simply fantastic book that is sure to leave you emotional by the end — but not without making you fall in love with its female protagonist first. The style in which Sparks writes is nothing short of brilliant.

Finally, I would also want them to read a book called How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-founded a Million Dollar Com-pany by my friend Varun Agarwal. It is a very interesting tale that will tickle the entrepreneurial bug in you. I want my next generation to leave the stereo-types aside and kick-start a new venture of their own, thereby introducing some-thing new to this world. And if they read this book during their college days, I’m sure it will influence them too.

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“If you could leave three books Rachel hamilton...was a psychiatrist and psychothera-pist. His wisdom and insight shine through, right from the opening line. To summarise: ‘Life