2. The Moomin books, by Tove Jansson
If we are doing this chronologically, and my main man Robin the accountant in Happy is the One would insist we do, I have to start with the Moomin books. My mum used to read to me when I was little and I just adored the characters and world that Tove Jansson created. I remember thinking I’d love to come up with fictional worlds of my own one day. Among the Moomin characters, my favourite has to be Moominpappa, with his urge to write (he has a memoir pen!), his struggles to find his place and his brilliant little sayings like ‘Bless my tail!’
2. Metamorphosis and Other Stories, by Franz Kafka
I studied Kafka a little when I did German at university and just loved his way of conveying the struggles of being human through weird and unforgettable stories. In Happy is the One, Astrid is a Kafka expert and shares one of Kafka’s most striking short stories with Robin, that of the ‘fasting artist’, a man exhibited in a circus cage on his own volition and starving himself for weeks at a time. This story is barely ten pages long, yet it left me with so much to think about.
3. May We Be Forgiven, by A M Homes
It was on re-reading this funny, sad and ultimately life-affirming American novel in 2016, that I thought, ‘Gosh, if books can be like this, I want a stab at writing one.’ It begins with a violent tragedy and follows a man out of his depth as he takes on the care of his niece and nephew, flounders at work and in love and grapples with demons from his past and family members from his present. It’s witty, unconventional and vast in scope, with so much to say about modern America. I had the pleasure of meeting Homes at a book signing and told her she’d inspired me to write my first novel. She made me promise I’d finish it. I often thought of that promise as I limped towards the last lines of my debut, Everything Happens for a Reason.
4. The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider
It was Twain’s belief that he would die when Halley’s Comet was in the sky that inspired the premise of Happy is the One. Twain had been born with the comet in 1835 and predicted he would go out with it when it was back in 1910. He was right. In Happy is the One, my main character Robin is born when the comet returns again in 1986. Newspapers at the time re-tell Twain’s beliefs about the comet and his spookily accurate prediction. Robin’s mother cuts out these articles and sticks them in Robin’s baby album. When I knew I was going to be working with Twain’s comet prophecy, I read his autobiography. It’s not something you can read cover to cover, given his editors were left with a mass (and a mess) of notes to put in some kind of order. But as always with Twain, there are great lines and observations and some extremely touching stories from a family life marked by many tragedies. He relays his daughter Susy’s cynicism at a young age when she lists all the hardships in life and then says simply, ‘What is it all for?’ This too provided a central theme for Robin’s story and his own quest for meaning. What is it all for?
5. The Return of Halley’s Comet, by Patrick Moore and John Mason
Once I knew Halley’s Comet had got its claws into me, I wanted to read up about its previous appearances in our skies. I can’t remember seeing it when I was seven and it was passing Earth in 1986, and I’m not surprised because as Patrick Moore and John Mason note in this brilliant book, the conditions then for viewing the comet from the Northern Hemisphere were poor. I picked this book up – published in 1984, but still available – thinking it would give me a fact or two about the time of Robin’s birth and a taste of the fervour around the comet’s first return since the dawn of the space age. What it provided was centuries of stories around the comet: observations of it by the Chinese and the Greeks thousands of years ago; myths about the comet being the star of Bethlehem; the comet’s appearance in the Bayeux Tapestry; its condemnation as an ‘agent of the devil’ by a 15th-century pope. Moore and Mason also share the colourful life story of Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley, who was the first to identify that a comet observed every seventy-five years or so throughout history was in fact ‘one and the same’. All of this history and Halley’s life fed into my character of Robin, himself an avid observer of the night sky.
Happy Is the One, by Katie Allen, is published by Orenda Books.
