Andrew Hunter Murray: ‘Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I find more jokes'

The Guardian

23-05-2025

My earliest reading memoryAt a secondhand book sale at school, a kind teacher recommended my mum buy Brian Jacques's Redwall. Noble monastic mice battle thuggish rats: catnip for a seven-year-old.
My favourite book growing upThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. The mad robots and two-headed aliens are great for the teenage brain, but beneath all that is the sadness, and the questions about why life has to be like this, all filtered through poor Arthur Dent. I sometimes pull it off the shelf to read half a page, just to remind myself how comedy writing is done.
The book that changed me as a teenagerI tried One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest a bit young, was baffled and thrown back by it, and then had another go, and couldn't believe how bracing Ken Kesey's writing was. It's pure psychedelia and probably hasn't aged tremendously well, but in terms of the way you could write, it really freed my mind (man).
The writer who changed my mindI was a full-on doomer about humanity's future until last year, when I read statistician and climate scientist Hannah Ritchie's excellent Not the End of the World. I'm now a fraction more optimistic, which makes me a fraction more fun at parties.
The book that made me want to be a writerI don't remember not wanting to be one, which is obviously insufferable. But I didn't seriously think about how to go about doing it until my mid-20s, when I read John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes. It's great sci-fi, but rooted in complex characters doing their best in an extraordinary situation, and it sparked the idea that became my first novel.
The book or author I came back toI used to think Charles Dickens was very boring and stuffy, but the more I read him now, the more I think he's the absolute nuts. Slightly embarrassingly, I welled up reading bits of Bleak House last year on a crowded commuter train. I had to pretend I had something in my eye.
The book I rereadI've been reading Pride and Prejudice every few years for two decades now. I studied Austen at university, spent 10 years in a Jane Austen-themed improvised comedy group called Austentatious, and P&P only gets better. Just when you think you've got everything out of it, you find more jokes, more wisdom, more understanding. It's stunning. Plus, everyone fancies Lizzie.
The book I could never read againThe Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz. Such beautiful prose, and Trump's ruined it for everyone now.
The book I discovered later in lifeA few years ago I discovered the publisher Persephone, which specialises in mid-20th-century books, mostly by women. The pitch is that these authors are all undeservedly forgotten. I was given a subscription by some comedian friends several years ago and am now about 50 books in. They are comfort reading, but high-quality, like a wholemeal pizza. Actually, that sounds horrible.
The book I am currently readingI'm regretfully coming to the end of Mick Herron's Slough House series, which has been a perfect, very British, very depressing, very funny pick-me-up.
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My comfort readAnything by PG Wodehouse. No matter how grim the path Bertie Wooster treads, no matter how strait the gate or charged with punishments the scroll, you know sunshine will eventually win the day.
A Beginner's Guide to Breaking and Entering by Andrew Hunter Murray is published by Penguin. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.