Reading lists

Diana Evans on the books that shaped her as a writer

The author of Ordinary People and A House for Alice on five ‘fearless’ books that have inspired and intrigued her.

Diana Evans
Photograph of Diana Evans against a dark background. She is wearing a yellow dress, looking off to the left of the shot, towards a light source.

The Temple of My Familiar by Alice Walker (1989)

The kindness and wisdom of Alice Walker’s writing was one of the things in my late teens and early twenties that helped me to discover who I was. She has helped many women in the same way, and it is this element of social conscience that makes her work so precious – literature entertains, but it also has an enormous capacity for comfort and guidance. ‘Helped are those who are content to be themselves,’ she writes here, ‘they will never lack mystery in their lives’.

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