Kala, A Reading List by Colin Walsh
By The West Kirby Bookshop
Kala, A Reading List by Colin Walsh
By The West Kirby Bookshop
Here's a selection of books recommended by Colin Walsh, if you've enjoyed 'Kala'. It's a wonderful mix of Colin's literary inspirations and new publications, to add to your bookshelves!
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
£9.99 £9.49The closest I’ve come to the childhood joy of being truly lost in a book, not wanting to come up for air. The Secret History is perhaps the Platonic ideal of a ‘literary thriller’, that hard-to-find book that combines character study with propulsive plot tension. Writing Kala, my dream was to create a story that had the emotional complexity and psychological depth of literary fiction but the page-turning momentum of a thriller. I wanted to give readers the magical experience Donna Tartt gave me.
The Girls
EMMA CLINE
£9.99 £9.49Another novel that fuses intimate character study with fierce plot momentum. This book influenced Kala in how it juxtaposes a lush coming-of-age story (whose sweetness is always verging on the tang of rot) with the brittle regrets of adulthood. What I love so much about Cline’s writing is how she uses emotional and physical details like a pointillist painter to build this drowsy, dreamlike atmosphere. I was inspired by The Girls’ sense of summer-before-the-fall, the murderous dread pulsing beneath all the sunlight, and Cline’s depiction of the damage done when thresholds go unmet (or unrecognised) till far too late.
The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
£9.99 £9.49Like many books on this list, The Virgin Suicides is narrated by adults who find themselves trapped in the amber of their younger, more vital selves. The book’s narrative chorus is full of thwarted yearning, as the narrators pathologically revisit old infatuations in order to hold time at bay and forge a path back to some idealised holy core. Like many of the other books that influenced Kala, The Virgin Suicides has a woozy and sunlit cinematic vibe that seduces you into the pitch-dark undertow broiling beneath all the romance. Sofia Coppola’s film adaptation still rocks, too.
A Brief History of Seven Killings: Special 10th Anniversary Edition of the Booker Prizewinner
Marlon James
£10.99 £10.44At the complete other end of the spectrum, there are things Marlon James does in this epic novel that only an epic novel can do. Taking the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley as its organizing event, this book is a polyphonic confluence of voice, language, pace, drama, rhythm, sex, violence, chaos. James is doing so much in this book, and he’s doing it all at the highest level. This novel literally changed my life; it’s the book that convinced me to start writing fiction. Kala would not exist if I hadn’t read this book.
Foster: by the Booker-shortlisted author of Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
£9.99 £9.49Keegan is the great classicist of contemporary Irish fiction. She tells concise Chekhovian stories that tend to reverberate more intensely than most epics. Her prose inspires me in many ways, particularly her disdain for stylistic showboating and her care for the truthful detail. All these deceptively simple sentences through which you suddenly fall into immense emotional depths. Foster, like most of her stories, can be read in one sitting, and is so enjoyable that you don’t notice the way it’s rearranging your innards till you find yourself reduced to a blizzard of tears by the final paragraphs.
The Mare
Mary Gaitskill
£9.99 £9.49The narrative frame of The Mare could make for a Disney film: Velveteen, a Dominican girl from the inner city, is fostered to a troubled white couple in upstate New York. There, she forges a bond with a wilful horse, with consequences for everyone. In Gaitskill’s hands this potentially sentimental plot is infused with all the wayward opacity, irresolution and knottiness of actual human experience. The Mare was important to me while writing Kala, because it showed that genre story elements can transcend themselves and become luminous through granular attention and fidelity to character, perspective, voice, and real life.
Dark Lies the Island
Kevin Barry
£9.99 £9.49Every Irish writer of my generation owes a debt to Kevin Barry. His work emerged like an arson attack on the tourist-friendly gentility that had settled over much Irish writing in the early 21st century. His vitality made room for everyone that’s followed – writers as different as Oisín Fagan and Sally Rooney all cite him as an influence. Dark Lies the Island is my personal favourite of his books (though all his books are brilliant, every Kevin Barry book is a gift to the world). Raucous, melancholic, at times deeply sinister, and seriously fun. He’s the king.
Cat's Eye
Margaret Atwood
£10.99 £10.44Atwood’s 1988 masterpiece is uniquely brutal and galvanising. Now approaching middle-age, painter Elaine Risley returns to Toronto for a career retrospective, and is plunged back into the very different Toronto of her youth, full of horrors she’s long tried to outrun. Cat’s Eye is most famous for its portrayal of how vicious children can be to one another – but upon rereading, it’s the adult relationship between Elaine and Cordelia that disturbs me most. I think of the adult Cordelia often, and it’s always with a jangled whir in my gut.
The Beach
Alex Garland
£9.99 £9.49Kala was largely inspired by books that have literary verve but a strong plot engine purring under the hood. The Beach is cinematic, gripping, and it gives us a narrator who’s charming (until alarming) company. Now that the internet has colonised virtually all our physical and psychic spaces, the pre-smartphone backpacker adventures of The Beach read like dispatches from a more vivid world. However, the novel itself is actually an assault on all romantic fetishizing of ‘unspoiled’ experience. If you’re only familiar with the preposterous and banal Danny Boyle movie, I’d urge you to read the book. It’s good.