What's on my bedside table: Aminatta Forna

“I usually read more than one book at a time. I’m currently reading three: one book has a place by the bath; one has a place by the bed, and then the book that is my current favourite is the one that I carry around with me on the Tube or the bus when I don’t have something else to do.”

“The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is a unique and passionate account of an adulterous love affair in wartime Britain, between a writer called Bendricks, who’s known only by his surname, and a woman called sarah, who is married to an up-and-coming civil servant. The truth is that this book is a love triangle, but it is an unexpected one. It is not Sarah, her husband and Bendricks: it is Sarah, Bendricks and God. Sarah, while Bendricks was unconscious has prayed to God that if he will spare Bendricks life, she will give up the adulterous affair. Sarah is a lapsed catholic and the rest of the book concerns her struggle to retain that promise to God.”

“Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje is probably the most conventional of all of his works. It’s a political story about a young woman who goes back to the land of her birth – Sri Lank – during the civil war. She is a forensic anthropologist and she has the task of identifying one of thousands of corpses, the result of political killings. It’s also about her relationship with the archaeologist with whom she works, and who has a different view on how they should go in search of the truth.”

“Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro opens in a place which at first glance appears to be a boarding school somewhere in Britain, but almost immediately, you sense something is different: the children don’t have a teacher – instead they have guardians. You don’t quite recognise the landscape: it appears to sometimes be in the past and sometimes in the future, but what you discover at the end is that these children are actually clones. They have been created so that their organs can be harvested for use in the medical profession and their fate is really to serve mankind and die. The book is also about repression of the soul, so that by the end of it, even as you will the children to run away from their fate, you know that, like the rest of us, they probably never will.”