These are the forty books which I have selected as my top influences; these are in no particular order except Wuthering Heights will always be at the top.


  • Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
  • Dracula by Bram Stoker
  • Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Braddon
  • Precious Bane by Mary Webb
  • I the Jury by Mickey Spillane
  • From Russia with Love by Ian Fleming
  • The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
  • Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence
  • Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson
  • Chickamauga by Ambrose Bierce
  • The Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper         (I know it's cheating - there are five novels in the series!)
  • The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
  • Mr Greedy by Roger Hargreaves
  • The Call of the Wild by Jack London
  • Pudd'n Head Wilson by Mark Twain
  • Tales of the Mysterious and Macabre by Algernon Blackwood
  • On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  • Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  • Sherlock Holmes Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Heino und Hanno by Else Jung
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkien                                      (I know this is a trilogy so I'm cheating again)
  • Centennial by James A Michener
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault
  • Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  • Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  • Varney the Vampyre, or, The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer
  • The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham
  • The Divided Self by R.D. Laing
  • Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Beetle by Richard Marsh
  • The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens                  (even though not completed this would have been a brilliant detective novel)
  • Horse Under Water by Len Deighton
  • The Great Tontine by Hawley Smart
  • Christine by Stephen King
If anybody had asked me to include plays or poetry in this top 40 I think my head would have exploded. I thought about ordering them alphabetically, or autobiographically..... but I decided against it!
However I thought I would just mention a couple of poets that I really love: W.B. Yeats; W.H. Auden; Byron; Keats and Dylan Thomas. I suppose I have to say that Emily Dickinson and Robert Lowell are my two favourite American poets.