Lucie Whitehouse was born in Gloucestershire in 1975. She read Classics at Oxford University and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of The House at Midnight, the TV Book Club pick; The Bed I Made and Before We Met, which was also a Richard & Judy pick and an ITV3 Crime Book Club selection. Her latest novel is Keep You Close, published by Bloomsbury. You can buy the book here.
Lucie Whitehouse shares her five most influential books.
Five Go To Smuggler’s Top by Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton was catnip to me when I was a child – I have precise memories of our copy of The Magic Faraway Tree in its shiny pea-green cover. Of all her books, though, Smuggler’s Top was the one. It had it all: a wild gothic location – the weird house on the Top with its network of catacombs; smugglers; mad scientists, and a sinister manservant named Block. Spot the eight-year-old who loved malign forces at work in darkness… Small wonder I grew up to write suspense; this helped plant the seed.
Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier
Smugglers (again), romance, a wild and isolated Cornish location – this book has it all.
Daphne du Maurier’s influence on me can’t really be confined to a single book, either. My father used to talk about her – he knew how much I loved the idea of her, this independent writing woman with the dark turn of mind. The week I turned twelve, my parents took us to the real Jamaica Inn and bought me a copy of the book. It was the start of a du Maurier reading jag that lasted for months.
Hippolytus by Euripides
This play starts with Aphrodite, goddess of love, deciding to punish the chaste Hippolytus’ refusal to worship her by making his stepmother, Phaedra, fall in love with him. The night our Classics group saw this performed, the object of my unrequited teenage passions was also in the theatre, and I will never forget the moment I realised that on stage, in words written in Greece 2,500 years earlier, an actress was describing the exact way that I, a sixteen-year-old girl in rural England, felt in1991. My interest in psychology took off and I decided on a Classics degree.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Having failed several times to get into Dickens as a teenager, I bought this at 35 and became a fanatic. What a book this is: set in London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution, it tells the story of Lucie Manette, her father’s false imprisonment in the Bastille and the two men who love her: upstanding French aristocrat Charles Darney and his lookalike, the dissolute English lawyer Sidney Carton. Full of atmosphere and menace, and what an ending! Brilliantly plotted, this taught me so much about story structure.
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
The story of the love affair between Maurice Bendrix and Sarah played out during the London Blitz – and Bendrix’s growing obsession when, after a chance meeting two years later, he hires a private detective to follow her. I love this book and Graham Greene in general for the way he combines gripping plots, clean but evocative writing and sharp-eyed observation of location, character and emotion. For me, the second half of this book isn’t as interesting as the first but I love it anyway for Bendrix and the forensic way Greene analyses his mind.
