On My Bedside Table: Sarah Maria Griffin

What is the award-winning author reading right now?

Sarah Maria Griffin is the author of the novels Spare & Found Parts and Other Words For Smoke, which won an Irish Book Award in 2019. She writes about video games for The Guardian, and her non-fiction has appeared in The Irish Times, The Winter Papers, and The Stinging Fly. Her latest novel, Eat The Ones You Love, is published by Titan Books.

“Almost all of my reading at the moment is in audio format, because my baby is eight months old and my hands are very full. However, she is very much enjoying listening to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a modern classic, while we continue our journey weaning onto solids. I first read this book when I was 19, and was the perfect age to fantasise about eloping off to a fancy liberal arts college in upstate New York and falling in with a group of obnoxious, wealthy little freaks who love studying ancient Greek and murdering people they don’t think are cool. On this new journey through the book, I am bowled over by the prose. Tartt’s narration is dry, catty, somehow still vulnerable. There is a reason this book occupies such a huge space in the public consciousness. I’m also listening to Bury Our Bones In The Midnight Soil, by Victoria Schwab – a triptych of a novel about three women with a taste for blood.

“The last book I read was Our Song, a bright and joyful romantic comedy by Irish author Anna Carey, with a real ring of truth about what it means to make art with your friends. I also read Skipshock by Caroline O’Donoghue, an ambitious, gorgeous fantasy novel about who has 24 hours in a day and who doesn’t, and what happens when a girl from Cork falls off a train and ends up far, far away. Next up are Oddbody by Rose Keating – a selection of surreal, feminist and gothic short fiction, and The Lamb by Lucy Rose, a horror story about motherhood and cannibalism. I may avoid listening to that one while feeding my daughter mushed-up banana and crackers.”