Jo Nesbø / ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’

 

Jo Nesbø

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Jo Nesbø: ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’

This article is more than 2 years old

The Norwegian crime writer talks about his early influences, changing tastes and the age-limit for enjoying Hemingway

Jo Nesbø

Fri 22 Sep 2023 10.00 BST

My favourite book growing up
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. My father grew up in New York; I guess that’s why there were a lot of American books in our house. These two by Mark Twain were food for the imagination for a kid like me. The Huck book was my first road novel, Tom Sawyer my first murder mystery.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet’s classic novel about life and exploitation as a gay man living on the margins in 1930s Europe, changed my view on what literature can and should deal with. At that age, I found it tough reading because the mental landscape of the main character was repellent to me. Not his sexual orientation, but because he found some kind of pleasure in being treated badly. I couldn’t grasp that. And that was probably what drew me to the novel.

The book that made me want to be a writer 
Both On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye were important. I do think writing is a result of reading, like making music is a result of listening to music. That it’s mainly a social reflex, like stories being told around a dinner table; somebody has contributed a story, now it’s your turn.

The book I could never read again
I was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. Recently I started rereading (which I very seldom do) a novel of his, and realised it felt dated. I don’t know if it’s because Hemingway, like Raymond Chandler, has influenced so many writers that they now can come across as almost comic copies. When I mentioned my disappointment, my 25-years-younger editor said, with a world-weary sigh: “But, you know, Hemingway is a young man’s writer.”

The book I discovered later in life
Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. I was recently going through the books I’ve inherited from my parents. It follows three generations of a family, with the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a backdrop, and it’s a gem of a novel. It has this sense of time and place that I know is impossible to construct – it has to already be there within the writer. It’s sad, it’s epic and it has a tragic gravity to it that brings a lump to my throat: the fact that you can’t go back, that the past – not the future – is the promised garden.

The author I came back to 
Well, Henrik Ibsen was mandatory reading when you went to school in Norway, and at that young age he felt old and boring. It was only later, when I was living a life where I could relate, that I started reading him. I went on to read all of his plays, every one of them, and realised what a great entertainer he is.

The book I am currently reading

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a background in social anthropology and psychology and it’s a convincing argument on how morality has evolved and on how it divides us in politics and social behaviour, enlightening when it comes to understanding why some Americans vote Republican in spite of being decent, intelligent human beings. Like David Hume said, reason is the slave of emotions. We use our intellect to find confirmation that what we feel and want to be true is actually the truth. Confirmation bias may carry us from our childhood to our grave, without ever feeling we were proved wrong. That goes for “them” and for me and you, Guardian readers.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE

2021
The books of my life / Amanda Gorman / ‘I wanted my words to re-sanctify the steps of the Capitol’Mary Beard / ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’

Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’Stephen King: ‘I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter’

Curtis Sittenfeld / ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
Elif Shafak / ‘Reading Orlando was like plunging into a cold but beautifully blue sea’
Jason Reynolds / “Reading rap lyrics made me realise that poetry could be for me”
Michael Rosen / ‘My comfort read? Great Expectations’
Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
Alan Garner / ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’
Rose Tremain / ‘My comfort reads are MasterChef cookbooks’
Oliver Jeffers / ‘Catch-22 was the first time I had a physical reaction to a book’
Penelope Lively / ‘Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees’


2022
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Edmund White / ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
David Mitchell / ‘If I need cheering up, Jamie Oliver’s recipes usually help’
Isabel Allende / ‘I have been displaced most of my life’

Nikesh Shula / 

Olivia Laing / 

Viet Thanh Nguyen / 

Madeline Miller /

Barbara Trapido / 

Monica Ali / 

Sebastian Barry / 

Hanif Kureishi / 

Neil Gaiman / 

Lee Child / 

PAGE 7

Meg Mason / 

Esther Freud / 

Maggie Shipstead / 

Ian Rankin / 

Julian Barnes / 

Sadie Jones / 

Tahmima Anam / 

Tess Gerritsen / 

Abdulrazah Gurnak / 

Susie Boyt / 

Sara Paretsky / 

Sebastian Faulks / 

Karen Joy Fowler / 

Eimear McBride / 

Sam Byers / 

Denise Mina / 

Adam Kay / 

Barbara Kingsolver / ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’

Kit de Waal / 

Sunjeev Sahota / 

PAGE 6

Shehan Karunatilaka / 

Michael Morpurgo / 

Michelle Zauner / 

Amy Blum / 

Philip Pullman / 

2023

Alex Wheatle /

Colin Thubron / 

Audrey Maggee / 

Joseph O'Connor /

Ned Beauman / 

Kevin Jared Hosein / 

Carlo Roveli / 

Benjamin Myers / 

Charlotte Mendelson /

Warsan Shire / 

Katherine Rundel / 

Louise Kennedy / 

Colson Whitehead / 

Han Kang / 

Dreda Say Mitchell / 

PAGE 5

Jessie Burton / 

Kamila Shamsie / 

Jenny Erpenbeck / 

Gary Shteyngart

Attica Locke /

Richard Ford / ‘I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere’

Elly Griffiths /

Juno Dawson / 

DBC Pierre / 

Patrick DeWitt / 

Lisa Jewell / 

Ayòbámi Adébàyó /

Bret Easton Ellis: ‘I connected with Quentin Tarantino’

Lynda La Plante / 

Preti Taneja / 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / 

Jo Nesbø / ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’

Lauren Groff / ‘Virginia Woolf’s Flush is delightfully bananas’

Paul Lynch / 

John Niven / 

PAGE 4

Natalie Haynes / ‘I couldn’t stop reading Stephen King - even at the top of the Eiffel Tower’
Richard Armitage / ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’

Dolly Alderton / 

Jonathan Escoffery / 

Joanne Harris / 

Hernan Diaz / 

Irenosen Okojie / 

Bob Mortimer / 

Francis Spufford / 

2024

Mieko Kawakami / “Franz Kafka es mi lectura reconfortante”

2025
Niall Williams / ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’
Graham Norton / ‘The Bell Jar changed how I felt about books’

Venom Queen / Amanda Seyfriend

 

AMANDA SEYFRIED

Amanda Seyfried, born on December 3, 1985, in Allentown, Pennsylvania, began her journey in the entertainment industry as a child model before transitioning to acting in the late 1990s. Her early television work in “As the World Turns” and “All My Children” honed her craft, but it was her breakout role as Karen Smith in the 2004 comedy “Mean Girls” that introduced her to global audiences. Her blend of comedic timing and natural charm captured Hollywood’s attention, propelling her into a series of acclaimed projects that showcased her ability to balance innocence with emotional depth. By the mid-2000s, she had emerged as one of the most promising young actresses of her generation, seamlessly navigating between independent films and major studio productions.

Richard Flanagan / ‘When I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop it had corked badly’

Richard Flanagan

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Richard Flanagan: ‘When I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop it had corked badly’

This article is more than 4 months old

The Booker-winning author on taking inspiration from Kafka, and a youthful passion for Jackie Collins

Friday 27 June 2025

My earliest reading memory
My mother reading Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows to me – and reading it again and again, because I loved it and her. I was perhaps three. We lived in a little mining town in the middle of the rainforest. It was always raining and the rain drummed on the tin roof. To this day that’s the sound I long to hear when I relax into a book – a voice in the stormy dark reminding me that I am not alone.

My favourite book growing up
Books were an odyssey in which I lost and found myself, with new favourites being constantly supplanted by fresh astonishments. Rather than a favourite book I had a favourite place: the local public library. I enjoyed an inestimable amount of trash, beginning with comics and slowly venturing out into penny dreadful westerns and bad science fiction and on to the wonderfully lurid pulp of Harold Robbins, Henri Charrière, Alistair MacLean and Jackie Collins, erratically veering towards the beckoning mysteries of the adult world.

The book that changed me as a teenager
Albert Camus’s The Outsider. It didn’t offer a Damascene revelation, though. I was 11. I absorbed it like you might absorb an unexploded cluster bomb.

The writer who changed my mind
When I was 27, working as a doorman for the local council, counting exhibition attenders, I read in ever more fevered snatches Kafka’s Metamorphosis, which I had to keep hidden beneath the table where I sat, balanced on my knees. A close family forsaking their son because he has turned into a giant cockroach, after the death of which they marvel at their daughter’s vitality and looks? It dawned on me that writing could do anything and if it didn’t try it was worth nothing. Beneath that paperback was a notebook with the beginnings of my first novel. I crossed it out and began again.

The book that made me want to be a writer
No book, but one writer suggested it might be possible for me – so far from anywhere – that I perhaps too could be a writer. And that was William Faulkner. He seemed, well, Tasmanian. I later discovered that in Latin America he seemed Latin American and in Africa, African. He is also French. Yet he never left nor forsook his benighted home of Oxford, Mississippi, but instead made it his subject. Some years ago I was made an honorary citizen of Faulkner’s home town. I felt I had come home.

The book or author I came back to
When I was young, Thomas Bernhard seemed an astringent, even unpleasant taste. But perhaps his throatless laughter, his instinctive revulsion when confronted with power and his incantatory rage speak to our times.

The book I reread
Most years, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud A Solitude, humane and deeply funny; and Anna Karenina, every decade or so, over the passage of which time I discover mad count Lev has again written an entirely different and even more astounding novel than the one I read last time.

The book I could never read again
On being asked to talk in Italy on my favourite comic novel I reread Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. It had corked badly. My fundamental disappointment was with myself, as if I had just lost an arm or a leg, and if I simply looked around it would turn back up. It didn’t.

The book I discovered later in life
Great stylists rarely write great novels. Marguerite Duras, for me a recent revelation, was an exception. For her, style and story were indivisible. Her best books are fierce, sensual, direct – and yet finally mysterious. I have also just read all of Carys Davies’s marvellous novels, which deserve a much larger readership.

The book I am currently reading
Konstantin Paustovsky’s memoir The Story of a Life, in which the author meets a poor but happy man in the starving Moscow of 1918 who has a small garden. “There are all sorts of ways to live. You can fight for freedom, you can try to remake humanity or you can grow tomatoes.” God gets Genesis. History gets Lenin. Literature gets the tomato-growers.

My comfort read
Of late, in our age of dire portents, I have been returning to the mischievous joy of James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson: “There is nothing worth the wear of winning, but the laughter and love of friends.”

THE GUARDIAN