Tom Crewe: Books That Changed My Life

The Hobbit is the first book I ever remember wanting to read. I was six; my dad had described the story to me and promised to get a copy from the library. But he came back from work and he’d forgotten. I burst into tears. The next day he did pick it up, and I can still feel my excitement when we began the story together at bedtime.

The Hobbit became even more important, though, because one night, when we were about halfway through, my dad couldn’t be there to read it to me. "What should I do?" I asked. "Read it on your own," he said. And so I can remember, too, the thrill of opening the book and entering that world without him. After that, I managed on my own. The Hobbit was the first real book I read. I’ve still got the library copy (no overdue fines, please), but I’ve never read it again. 

I grew up loving English lessons and wanting to be a novelist, but decided to study history on a whim, having been bowled over by a talk at a university open day. Eight years later, I had a PhD.

I don’t regret it (after all, my novel is set in the 1890s), but it did mean that, for several years, I read mainly history books and hardly any fiction. George Eliot’s Middlemarch—its enormous, energising intelligence and sympathy—changed that. It brought me back to reading novels, and to my original desire to write one myself.

How can one not be changed by reading Jane Austen? The wonderful, everlasting thing about Emma is that it’s easy to say why it’s a work of genius—the characters, the dialogue, the plot with its many ironies and reversals—and yet hard, still, to understand quite how Austen brings it off.

"Of all great writers," Virginia Woolf said of her, "she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness." Every time I go back to Emma, or any of Austen’s books, I am trying, and happily failing, to catch her.

The New Life by Tom Crewe (Vintage, £9.99) is the winner of this year's Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award