Why the books we loved at school are the ones that live with us the longest

Early September often has a “back to school” feeling to it whatever your age, and this week I’ve been chatting to authors about the books from their school days that have stayed with them into adulthood. And scroll down to find out which books Leave the World Behind author Rumaan Alam, who was interviewed for yesterday’s Saturday magazine, has loved lately.

Sometimes studying a book at school is a sure-fire way to make you hate it – I remember my classmates throwing GCSE poetry anthologies on to a bonfire with glee when I was a teenager. But there is also a chance your teacher will place a book in your hand that blows your mind wide open. I will never forget reading Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber for the first time during my A-levels, astounded not only by the wit and sexiness of the stories but that it was actually my homework to read them.

“The books you discovered at school are like old memories; they just keep coming back,” says Caledonian Road author Andrew O’Hagan. Often these books make such an impression because we read them at a time when we were desperately trying to make sense of the world and the people around us. Novelist Elif Shafak, who attended schools in Turkey and Spain, says she read Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities just after her parents had divorced and she was briefly sent to live with grandparents. “At a time of deep loneliness, it healed my fractured heart,” she says.

Many of us will vividly remember “class reads”, where each student took it in turns to read a passage of a book aloud. Booker-longlisted novelist Samantha Harvey read The Hobbit this way: “I had never before, and have never again, shared a reading experience ‘live’ with so many people, and we all lived there together, inside that book, in a quite entrancing way,” she says.

“The process was an invitation to clown around with funny voices and double entendres,” says writer and children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce, remembering a class read in his first year at “big school”.

“There was the boy who stopped after almost every sentence to ask plausible but pointless questions. There was a boy whose voice was so droning you could’ve used it to tranquillise large charismatic fauna. Only a really amazing book could punch through the static of teenage testosterone.”

The book that managed to do that for Cottrell-Boyce was I Am David by Anne Holm, translated by LW Kingsland, the story of a boy who escapes from a concentration camp in an unnamed eastern European country during the second world war and makes his way, alone, to Denmark.

“I’ve reread it recently,” Cottrell-Boyce says. “It’s an extraordinary thing – a story about war and refugees but which is ultimately about the power of goodwill and kindness. It’s also worth mentioning that I Am David was translated from the Danish. There’s such a strong tradition of children’s books in translation. Long may that continue.”

O’Hagan discovered I Am David at school too: a teacher at his primary school with “white hair like a Whippy ice-cream” read it aloud to the class, and he was “mesmerised”, later borrowing it from the library and reading it over and over.

“I couldn’t believe that a story which hardly mentions emotion could cause you to feel so much,” he says.

Rereading it, Cottrell-Boyce says he “heard again the voices of my 11-year-old classmates and wondered if life had been kind to them too.”

I often demand that people I know buy books that I have loved, and one such is Loved and Missed, Susie Boyt’s deceptively simply novel about addiction and maternal love. It is one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve read in the past couple of years. I have pushed it into the hands of many of my friends, and when they, too, have read and fallen in love with it, I feel strangely more triumphant than if it were a book I’d written.

Another book I’ve been insistent my friends pick up is Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, similar to Boyt’s in that it explores the primal bonds of family, but a quite different reading experience. Riley’s book is merciless and gutsy, a rare thing in its frank appraisal of parents, who are only people, and therefore imperfect.

These are not novels that reinvent the form, that rely on pyrotechnics or grand gestures; they are understated and straightforward books that remind me what the novel at its best is capable of – lifting me right out of my life and into another.