Nothing to Declare

watch these, I’m afraid) and the glorious pop song, ‘Friends of Mr Cairo’, by Jon and Vangelis.

Perhaps a little pretentious, but I chose this 2000-page classic as my personal reading project when I began my bachelor’s degree at York. It was something of a reaction to the hordes of students that seemed inappropriately obsessed with Harry Potter ( The Order of the Phoenix was published that year). I rattled through the first chapters – it’s satirical and sharply observed – but it took me about six months to finish in its entirety. I remember also wading through hundreds of pages about midway through, when Tolstoy rather unreasonably decided to explain the complex and dull raison d'être of the Freemasons. That small blip apart, it turns out that Tolstoy was rather good at this writing business. For the uninitiated, War and Peace is a panoramic saga about a group of intertwining aristocratic Russian families as they navigate a tumultuous 15 year period at the start of the 19 th century. It’s probably the best thing I have ever read.

I’ve listed these two books together, even though they are quite different. I read them at roughly the same time, both having a strikingly profound effect on me. Smith’s debut novel focuses on the relationship between wartime friends, Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, and their families. It was published in 2000 to much celebration, exploring Britain’s relationship with commonwealth immigrants. Kureishi’s semi -autobiographical novel follows the teenage years of Karim, a mixed-race Londoner forced to navigate the bourgeois suburbs of London in the 1970s. I chose to write about both these novels for my master’s dissertation, which focussed on the multitudinous perspectives of post-colonial London.

Of course, since 2008 I have read many other books that have entertained, inspired and disappointed me – but these seven have helped to shape my