Sara Collins: ‘I can’t even start James Joyce’s Ulysses, let alone finish it'

This year’s winner of the Costa first novel award on James Baldwin’s perfect love story and why she reads essays for comfort

The book I’m currently reading
A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes. Set in mid-20th century Jamaica, it tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a boy adopted after being discovered in a basket as a baby, who falls in love with his best friend, Arrienne. The premise – Moshe was born with skin that can’t be classified as either black or white – is ingenious, and the novel is an epic modern fairytale that offers the pleasure of being steeped in Forbes’s poetic, intoxicating sentences right from the opening line: “Long ago, when teachers were sent from Britain to teach in the grammar schools of the West Indian colonies (it was Great Britain then, not Little England as it is now, after Brexit, and the fall of the empire).”

The book I wish I’d written
The surest way to spoil your enjoyment of a book is by writing it, so I’ll just be glad I got to read all those masterpieces rather than having to write them.

The book I think is most underrated
I have long admired James Baldwin’s essays yet I was guilty of underrating his novels until I read Giovanni’s Room. It’s a perfect love story, not least because it’s tragic.

The book that had the greatest influence on me
Toni Morrison’s Beloved. If I hadn’t read it as a teenager I would never have dared to write. It wasn’t just the instant urge to attempt my own imitations of Morrison’s style, but the fact that I didn’t think black women could ever be taken seriously as writers until her work reshaped the possibilities, demonstrating that our “specific” could indeed become universal. Bernardine Evaristo is doing a similar thing now.

The last book that made me cry
Nina X by Ewan Morrison. A deep, cathartic, last‑page sob.

The last book that made me laugh
Ali Wong’s Dear Girls, filthy and funny in equal measure.

The book I couldn’t finish
I can’t even start James Joyce’s Ulysses, let alone finish it. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan comes downstairs bearing his bowl of lather … and I’m out.

The book I’m ashamed not to have read
Middlemarch by George Eliot. Every so often I slink back to it but I always give up after a few pages.

My earliest reading memory
Crying in a corner of the living room because the little match girl of Hans Christian Andersen’s short story had died. I remember feeling stunned that such a terrible thing could have happened. I had only encountered fairytales with happy endings before then; that story was my introduction to the real world, with its capricious, corroding griefs.

My comfort read
Good essays give all the joy of being electrified by clever conversation, minus the social anxiety. When in need of that kind of comfort I’ll reach for anything by Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith, Nora Ephron, Roxane Gay, Samantha Irby, to name a few. I’m also a sucker for a love story, especially if it’s written by Josie Silver, Marian Keyes or Jojo Moyes.

The book I give as a gift
For children it will usually be Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, a Pippi Longstocking story, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

• Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton (Viking) has won this year’s Costa first novel award. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

Contributor

Sara Collins

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