11 Books that Inspired Catherine Taylor's 'The Stirrings'
By Damian Barr's Bookshop
11 Books that Inspired Catherine Taylor's 'The Stirrings'
By Damian Barr's Bookshop
In our next episode of the podcast, Catherine Taylor reads from her new book The Stirrings: A Memoir in Northern Time, a story about coming of age in the north of England during the 1970s and 80s. Historical events were happening all around her: from the pursuit and capture of the Yorkshire Ripper, to the anti-nuclear protests and Miners’ Strike. But there were also pressing concerns at home, including her parent’s divorce and a debilitating illness that would define her late adolescence.
Damian will be in-conversation with Catherine this August at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
New episodes of the podcast run every Wednesday. In the meantime, discover the books that inspired the author with captions prepared by Catherine. Happy reading!
The Millstone
Margaret Drabble
£9.99 £9.49Margaret Drabble’s ground-breaking 1965 work, about a young woman who becomes pregnant after her first sexual encounter, is a book which sustained me during one of the most difficult times in my own life.
The Voyage Out
Virginia Woolf
£8.99 £8.54I wrote my university dissertation on Woolf’s early novels, which aren’t perhaps read as much as they should be. The Voyage Out was her first, published in 1915. Aged 24, Rachel Vinrace sets sail for South America on a voyage of self-discovery. There she will find love, hope, and darkness.
Nineteen Eighty-Four: Anniversary Edition
George Orwell
£12.00 £11.401984 features heavily in the chapter in my book which is set in the same year – Orwell’s classic of dystopia and doublespeak never fails to terrify, to move, and to be relevant.
The Changes Trilogy: The Devil's Children, Heartsease, and the Weathermonger
Peter Dickinson
£24.99As a child I was addicted to the Changes trilogy, and watched the televised series during the mid-1970s. A world in which people grow terrified of machines and go back to living off-grid seems even more possible now than it did then!
Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son: The Story of the Yorkshire Ripper
Gordon Burn
£10.99 £10.44Gordon Burn’s name is synonymous with penetrating non-fiction portraits of some of the darkest recesses of the human mind. His forensic study of Peter Sutcliffe, the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper, is a classic of the genre.
Cassandra
Christa Wolf
£10.99 £10.44The theme of Cassandra – in Greek myth the king of Troy’s daughter whose prophecies were doomed to be disbelieved – runs throughout my book. In 1983 East German writer Christa Wolf published her own interrogation of Cassandra’s story, to address the perils of the nuclear arms race.
A Traveller in Time
Alison Uttley
£7.99 £7.59A historical time-slip children’s novel based on real events during the reign of Elizabeth I, when Derbyshire nobleman Anthony Babington plotted to put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. A magical book, set close to where I grew up.
The Magic Toyshop
Angela Carter
£9.99 £9.49Surreal and unsettling, Carter’s 1967 novel is the perfect read for a nascent self. Aged 15, orphaned Melanie goes to live in her inventor uncle’s toyshop, in a coming-of-age story with a difference.
Blow Your House Down
Pat Barker
£9.99 £9.49Pat Barker’s second novel, published in 1984, after the Yorkshire Ripper was convicted, tells the story of a serial killer stalking Bradford and targeting sex workers. Uncompromising, poignant, hard-hitting.
Blood and Guts in High School
Kathy Acker
£9.99 £9.49The book I kept hidden under my bed as a teenager. Kathy Acker was infuriating, inspiring and gone too soon. This is a lurid, metafictional hot mess of punk reinvention and outrage, written in the white-heat of late 1970s’ New York.