The novelist on the influence of Benedict Kiely, the comforts of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine and feeling changed by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
The book I am currently reading
I am rereading Jim Harrison’s book of poems Letters to Yesenin. The poem is an epic suicide note to a suicide, but Harrison says that it doesn’t come to him like a burning bush or a pillar of light but he has decided to stay.
The book that changed my life
My father [Sean] wrote a children’s soccer book, Goals for Glory, in the 1970s. It was read aloud by one of my teachers at school in Dublin. When Georgie Goode, the hero, scores the winning goal it set my class alight: one of my friends danced on the desk. And I remember thinking: that goal came from the inside of my father’s head.