John Patrick McHugh: 10 of the books that have influenced me through the years

Irish Examiner

29-04-2025

Beano
Let me cheat with the first selection: not a book but a humble comic. My earliest memory of reading was with the Beano.
The Beano.
I remember laying on my stomach while riffling through its pages, giggling and feeling as if I was catching up with friends in Denis and Gnasher, the Bash Street Kids. There was a cosiness to this experience, a safety, but it was also my first sense of interiority: here was an experience for me alone amid the noise of family, here was something that let me be in on the joke rather than my parents. Additionally: I probably owe my refined sense of humour to this magazine.
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
My novel is a sports book, kind of – a distinction that still surprises – and when writing it, I hoped that the GAA side of it would feel integral to the emotional side: the football was not the thing itself but part of the overall package. This balance is handled deftly in non-fiction – Dunphy's Only A Game springs to mind – but rarer to find in fiction, and for that reason and more, Western Lane is a rare triumph. It is about grief, family and the racketed sport of squash: elements that all work together, enhance the other. A kind of sport book that gave me confidence in writing my own kind of sport book.
Dubliners by James Joyce
I feel like we all have those moments in our lives when suddenly something makes sense that didn't a moment before. For me this occurred upon reading Araby in Dubliners. I was eighteen. I was unsure about what I was doing in college, unaware of literature at large, and in my first week I was handed this story. I read it and I saw myself – my skin glowed when I played outside and how did Joyce know that?! – and I saw what writing can do. A door had been opened inside me, and it was a door I didn't know was there, nevermind that it had been locked. It's not hyperbolic to say this book changed my life.
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
Tonnes of books are labelled brave these days but most of them, I feel, are not brave at all. Often, they read as if sculpted for our time: a chorus for the agreed. Noble and worthy, but not brave. A brave book, for me, should rally against the accepted, should feel wrong. Sabbath's Theater is a brave book. It's a twisted love story about a disgraced puppeteer and his affair with a married woman. It is a novel that astounds because Roth wrote it so late in the game and yet here is throwing everything at us. Rude, outrageous, ambitious and it houses the most romantic scene in literature involving the remembrance of urolagnia.
Running Dog by Don DeLillo
DeLillo: is there another cultural figure who has been more prescient about our modern world? Indeed, is there a writer alive better? The guy has authored too many bangers – The Names, Mao II, Libra – so I have gone for a book I feel is underappreciated (even by the man himself): Running Dog. It's about the hunt for a sex tape filmed by Hitler in his bunker in Berlin. It has all the DeLillo trademarks – those sentences, that dialogue as if it is off its axis – and what is especially haunting about this one is the eventual reveal of the 'sex' tape: shocking and humanising, a scene that will linger in the reader's mind.
Amongst Women by John McGahern
McGahern arrived to me after Joyce and shaped my writing to the point I had to forgot about him: his influence was sticky on my stories, Yew trees kept cropping up. I returned to him in the course of writing my novel, and I have been captivated all over again by this great work in particular. The story follows the brutal patriarch, Moran, and the shadow Moran casts on the lives of his daughters. I have gone to town on my copy of the novel – underlying entire passages, dismantling scenes – in my attempt to answer the almighty question: how does McGahern make the everyday rhythms of country life hook you like a thriller?
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
A novel set in Tudor times about a clerk and his sudden professional ascension should read dry, it should feel worn and dusty, and yet Mantel's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell is a whirlwind: invigorating, discombobulating, thrilling. We are in Cromwell's scheming mind, we are in the present moment, we are in the court of King Henry as men tug fortune their way while seeking to maintain their heads. It's a drama, it's a character study, it's a historical document, it's a modern novel set in the past. By the close of the third one, I was hoping against hope that Cromwell might slip free from the net of history.
Happiness, As Such by Natalia Ginzburg
The best book recommendations come in two emotional states: one, when the recommender has drink taken, and two, when they haven't even finished the book yet and still are compelled to gush: this second option occurred when a friend emailed me about Natalia Ginzburg and her genius. To read Ginzburg is to read someone who can see-through the world: who can present the essence of you and I. I adore her sentences, their conversational and stylish nature, and I have picked Happiness, As Such, but honestly, you can't go wrong with any Ginzburg. A remarkable individual besides being a remarkable writer: her struggle against a fascist Italian state could be as influential as her writing soon enough.
The Ambassadors by Henry James
I had never read James beyond a story or two, and at the start of this year, I set out to rectify this glaring omission by reading The Ambassadors: and yeah, I get it now. It's the turn of the 20th century and Lambert Strether is shipped from America to Paris by his soon-to-be-wife to check in on her delightfully named son, Chad – for suspicions abound about Chad and women. Look, no point fooling you: it is an intimidating book to read, but once you wade knees-deep into James's dense and playful style, something will click, and the novel will begin to flow brilliantly. And big surprise: Henry James is hilarious.
Enter Ghost by Isabelle Hammad
Here is an intelligent and artful book that is proof that the novel as a form still has something to add in this age of screens and disinformation: for here is our real world politics on stage, here is modern history made digestible. Our narrator is a Palestinian actress returning to Haifa and who subsequently joins up with a ragtag band scheming to stage the play Hamlet in the West Bank. What could go wrong? And what could easily and justly be a fiery polemic is instead an exquisitely crafted novel about family, displacement, resilient and grave injustice and repression. Timely is a descriptor that is batted about too much, but in this case...
Fun and Games, by John Patrick McHugh, published by 4th Estate, is out now