Booker Winning Author Shehan Karunatilaka Shares the Books That Inspired The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
By Sort of Books
Booker Winning Author Shehan Karunatilaka Shares the Books That Inspired The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
By Sort of Books
This is list of books that inspired me while I wrote The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. All are highly recommended, even for readers who aren’t writing satirical mysteries about murdered journalists.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Mohammed Hanif
£9.99 £9.49The gold standard for South Asian political novels and the benchmark for satirical fiction from anywhere. Works on many levels and rewards many re-reads.
Noontide Toll
Romesh Gunesekera
£8.99 £8.54There are many brilliant books on the Sri Lankan tragedy, but this is by far my favourite. The first fiction to engage with the end of the war, it has a subtlety and nuance to both its characters and its commentary, that ensure the text remains timely even a decade later.
Kiss of the Spider Woman: The Queer Classic Everyone Should Read
Manuel Puig
£9.99 £9.49Maali Almeida, my closeted queen narrator owes much to many iconic gay literary characters, but none more so than the romantic Luis Molina in this revolutionary classic.
Unaccustomed Earth
Jhumpa Lahiri
£9.99 £9.49You know you’ll never write people, relationships, the heart and the soul as well as her, but you still keep trying.
The Sandman Volume 1: Preludes and Nocturnes
Neil Gaiman and Sam Kieth
£16.99 £16.14If you’re world-building an afterlife, Gaiman’s dreamscape and its strange creatures can be a constant source of ideas, inspiration and pleasure.
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
David Eagleman
£9.99 £9.4940 tales or takes on the afterlife. Easily my most gifted book. It should be made compulsory in schools for its poetry, wisdom and mind-altering ideas.
Wishful Drinking
Carrie Fisher
£8.99 £8.54I wish that Carrie Fisher had written more and snorted less. Belies misguided notions that women aren’t hilarious and biographies have to be formulaic.
Galapagos
Kurt Vonnegut
£8.99 £8.54A million-year-old ghost narrates the demise of the human race with compassion and wit. Vonnegut blames the whole mess on our big brains and it breaks the author’s great big heart.