S. G. MacLean is a multi-award-winning historical thriller writer, and in her new book The Winter List she returns to her 17th century heartland. To celebrate the publication of The Winter List, we chat with her about some of her favourite books.

The Winter List
By S. G. MacLean
Published by Quercus

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading? 

My earliest memory of books and reading is of the bedroom I shared with two of my siblings, and the book cupboard with sliding doors that was set beneath the window. In the cupboard was a large, beautifully-illustrated book of stories and poems for children. One of the stories was The Little Match Girl. I have a vague memory that I would ask my mother to read it to me sometimes, and that sometimes I would get it out for myself and just look at the pictures but not read it, because the story always made me cry. A few years later I remember my older sister being annoyed with me because my mum made her move her copy of an Agatha Christie novel, with its terrifying 1970s cover image, out of the bedroom because the sight of it frightened me.

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest novel The Winter List. What did you want to explore in writing this book?    

The Winter List is a follow-on to the Damian Seeker books which were set in Oliver Cromwell’s London. This book is set in 1662 York, two years after the restoration of the Stuarts and four after Seeker, a Republican soldier and agent-handler, had left England for Massachusetts. It explores what happens to the other characters from the series who have been left behind, to get on with their lives under a restored monarchy. I’d grown attached to the characters who’d become Seeker’s friends or enemies throughout the original series and felt I hadn’t tied up their stories properly. Some of them have to face the fact that under the Stuarts, some of their secrets from the days of Cromwell’s protectorate might be revealed, and put them in jeopardy from the spies and regicide-hunters out to exact the Royalists’ revenge on their enemies. I set the book in York, where one of the Seeker books had been set, because it’s a perfect, atmospheric setting for a story of intrigue within the relatively contained space of its amazing walls.

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself? 

Neil Gunn, Butcher’s Broom. I discovered Neil Gunn’s writing in sixth year English at school. Our teacher had quite a laissez-faire attitude to literary criticism and we were just basically handed the books and told to read them. Gunn’s writing was a revelation to me. The only writing about the Highlands that I’d before were Jacobite or spy adventure stories, but these books felt as if they were about people I could almost glimpse, passing through the landscape I lived in, just a generation or so before me. It was more than a generation, of course, but I understood the characters and their world and felt they were the books that told me who I am. The story they told was rooted in old beliefs but was not romantic, rather it was one of social and political injustice and has had a profound influence on my personal politics and on my view of myself as a Highlander ever since.

The book as . . . an object. What is your favourite beautiful book?

There are a few contenders for this from books I have accumulated while working on my WIP, which is set in Scotland in the 1830s. I think the winner must be the 1841 New Edition of Robert Chambers’ Popular Rhymes of Scotland. I found it in one of the two really excellent second-hand bookshops on Dingwall High St, as ever when I had gone in for something else. The cover is royal blue, with a beautiful indented double border in black, of thistles. The front cover is embossed in the centre with a golden medallion illustrating one of the stories inside, and the same illustration is featured in the frontispiece. The endpapers are a delicate and profuse repeating pattern of interlocking briar roses. I bought the book for its content, as I do with all books, but the fact that it’s also a beautiful artefact gives me a lot of pleasure.

The book as . . . a relationship. What is your favourite book that bonded you to someone else?  

Albert Camus, The Stranger. The only Camus I had read before was The Plague/La Peste, which was in 1^st Year French at University. I had him lumped with Sartre in my head as ‘Existentialist’. Whilst I found Sartre’s work interesting, I didn’t actually enjoy reading it. Camus I did enjoy, but I’m not sure I altogether understood it. Then, a few years later, my (now) husband gave me a copy of Camus’ The Stranger, which was an important book to him. I loved the book and I think it really gave me an insight into my husband. I still have the copy he gave me.

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?  

Ha, well, if we’re talking rebellion, it has to be Gabba Gabba Hey, the story of the Ramones. I was 13 when I first heard The Ramones on the radio in 1979. I absolutely fell for Joey Ramone’s voice, and he was my major teenage crush. For a very shy, studious girl in the Highlands to discover New York Punk was quite a revelation and I bought any merchandise I could lay my hands on, including the book, Gabba Gabba Hey! It made more clear to my very naïve and cloistered 13 year-old self what the songs and the culture were actually about. I was terrified of my parents coming across it, and overcome with feelings of sanctification when Pope John Paul II visited Scotland in 1982, I threw the book out, which I now regret.

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you? 

Vikram Seth’s, A Suitable Boy I don’t think I had ever read something set in India that was written by an Indian before, and this book was just a marvellous, generous delight that gave me an insight into at least some of the complexity and richness of Indian society and culture. Even now I feel as if I am seeing its scenes in colour. The characterisation was wonderful and the scope quite breath-taking. It revealed to me a world I had very little understanding of in a manner that seemed to invite me in. It was a huge book, of course – completely unsuitable for the mother of two young children that I then was, yet I took it everywhere with me. I have a memory of standing in the kitchen, stirring a pan of soup with one hand as I held the book in the other, reading while my two toddlers somehow entertained themselves in the living room next door. The soup didn’t burn and the children seem to have turned out alright. I still have my copy of that book too. 

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next? 

I’m looking forward to getting back to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud. I started reading it a few days before I embarked on almost three weeks of events and away from home engagements, and it was just too big and heavy to carry about with me from place to place, train to train. I’m almost finished the second of the two slim volumes I did take with me, Michiko Aoyama’s What you are looking for is in the Library, which I’m really enjoying, but I can’t wait to get back to The Fraud because it’s just fabulous. In The Fraud Smith absolutely skewers bad writing and authorial pretensions, and I did make a point of reading from a chapter entitled, ‘I do not advise you to enter upon a literary career’, to a group of creative writing students I was teaching, which I’m pleased to say they found very funny.

The Winter List by S. G. Maclean is published by Quercus, priced £20.00.