The book I am currently reading
Isabella Hammad’s forthcoming debut The Parisian. It’s a big family novel like Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy but it charts the history of Palestine, and starts off on a ship to Marseille. The prose is impeccable.
The book I wish I’d written
Home by Marilynne Robinson. Racial politics, family and faith – the perfect combination of spiritual insight and human failings.
The book that influenced my writing
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys. The young woman from a warmer climate pushing her way through a baffling Britain, the wretchedness and vulnerability of being an outsider written simply and transparently – it haunts everything I write.
The book that is most underrated
Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born are just as powerful as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, if not more. They deserve the same readership.
The book that changed my life
When I first moved from Sudan to Scotland in my mid-20s, I was homesick and troubled. Mercy Oceans Book Two by Mevlana Sheikh Nazim Adil Al‑Haqqani An-Naqshband made me understand what I was yearning for.
The book that changed my mind
In successive stages Alan Spence’s The Magic Flute, Robin Jenkins’s The Cone-Gatherers and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still convinced me that I could connect to Scotland as a place, that I could love it and write about it.
The last book that made me laugh
Mimi by Lucy Ellmann. There is a fight scene involving bagels which still makes me laugh just thinking about it.
The book I couldn’t finish
I had to force myself to stop reading A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. It was gripping but that feast of heartbreak and cruelty was releasing toxins into my system. You can throw up a bad meal but what you read stays inside you forever.
The book I’m most ashamed not to have read
I studied statistics at university, and the English literature covered at my secondary school was rudimentary. In this way many of the classics passed me by. I’m most ashamed though of not studying any Shakespeare.
My earliest reading memory
My mother teaching me how to read the Qur’an.
My comfort read
Anything by Daphne du Maurier.
The book I most often give as a gift
My own. Family and friends shouldn’t pay to read it.
The book I’d most like to be remembered for
I’d rather be forgotten and then rediscovered like Zora Neale Hurston.
• Bird Summons by Leila Aboulela is published by W&N. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
