https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/17/sara-collins-if-i-hadnt-read-beloved-i-would-never-have-dared-to-write

This year’s winner of the Costa first novel award on James Baldwin’s perfect love story and why she reads essays for comfort

The book I’m currently reading
A Tall History of Sugar by Curdella Forbes. Set in mid-20th century Jamaica, it tells the story of Moshe Fisher, a boy adopted after being discovered in a basket as a baby, who falls in love with his best friend, Arrienne. The premise – Moshe was born with skin that can’t be classified as either black or white – is ingenious, and the novel is an epic modern fairytale that offers the pleasure of being steeped in Forbes’s poetic, intoxicating sentences right from the opening line: “Long ago, when teachers were sent from Britain to teach in the grammar schools of the West Indian colonies (it was Great Britain then, not Little England as it is now, after Brexit, and the fall of the empire).”

The book I wish I’d written
The surest way to spoil your enjoyment of a book is by writing it, so I’ll just be glad I got to read all those masterpieces rather than having to write them.