The Good Books, Rosie Walker: ‘I’m absolutely in awe of Taylor Jenkins Reid, her novels are incredibly well-researched’

Rosie Walker on her love of Taylor Jenkins Reid novels, the books she is most looking forward to this year, and what she read as a child.

The first book I remember reading:

My parents read a lot with me as a child and I loved books from a really young age. I remember loving Winnie the Pooh, Allan and Janet Ahlberg, Roald Dahl and Judith Kerr. As I got older and could read by myself, the stories I moved on to were often mysteries and adventure stories: the Famous Five, the Secret Seven, Harriet the Spy, The Secret Garden. Secret passages, ghosts, hidden treasure, locked rooms. Looking back, it seems clear that I would end up writing psychological thrillers.

A book I recommend to everyone:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. People are often surprised when I recommend an 850-page Western set in the mid-1800s USA – it’s a massive departure from the mostly Scotland-set domestic psychological thrillers that I write, or my usual reading fare. A friend recommended it to me years ago and I bought a copy and left it on my shelf for months, daunted by the length and the genre. But one day I picked it up and within the first couple of lines I was hooked.

The best book I have read in this year:

I just finished reading Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a brand new novel coming out in June set during the 1980s space shuttle programme. The main character Joan is one of the first female astronauts at that time, and she is working in mission control the day there’s a terrifying disaster on the space shuttle. Joan has to communicate calmly and clearly with the shuttle to try and get them safely home, all the while keeping a huge secret about her feelings for one of her fellow astronauts on the ship. It’s heart-wrenching, romantic, and incredibly well researched.

The book I am most looking forward to:

Emily Henry’s epic-sounding Great Big Beautiful Life, and Sophie Cousens’s hilarious Is She Really Going Out With Him?, about a divorcee trying to find her feet on her own. Then there’s Mhairi McFarlane’s Cover Story, which is about two office rivals who work at a national newspaper, forced to pretend they’re in love in pursuit of the story of a lifetime. All three of these authors fall into a very particular category for me – if their name is on the cover, I know I’ll love it.

A book I didn’t finish:

Controversially, I don’t finish books all the time. I used to try and finish everything I started but as I’ve got older I’ve come around to the ‘life’s too short’ mentality and I move onto the next book at the slightest excuse. The Magus by John Fowles came with an emphatic recommendation from a friend but I felt like the writer was laughing at the reader, almost goading us and daring us to keep reading despite all the tricks being played at our expense.

An author that has inspired me:

I’m absolutely in awe of Taylor Jenkins Reid. Her novels are incredibly well-researched, with such variety of locations, time periods and events, from the female astronaut in the 1980s space programme (Atmosphere), through the life and loves of a Hollywood Golden Age star (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo), to the meteoric rise to fame of a 1970s rock band (Daisy Jones and the Six). Taylor Jenkins Reid seems to identify the most interesting periods of history and then immerses the reader right in the middle of the most exciting people and places, without ever seeming to over-research or over-explain.

The book I am reading now:

The Penthouse by Catherine Cooper, which comes out in April. It takes place during the reunion of a Girls Aloud-esque band who were famous fifteen years before, until the band’s lead singer Enola went missing without a trace. Now the remaining members are back together for the reunion, but strange and dangerous things keep happening. What I loved about this book were real-life touches that made it feel like it could be a real story: the newspaper articles, letters, and online chats dotted throughout which really added to the mystery.  I love novels that use fictional documents to tell parts of the story, and books that offer an insight into rare elements of everyday life, like fame.

Read more of The Good Books here.

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