Catherine Banner

Catherine Banner was born in Cambridge, UK, in 1989 and began writing at the age of fourteen. She studied English at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, before moving to County Durham where she worked as a secondary school teacher. She has published a trilogy of young adult novels, The Last Descendants.

Banner's debut adult novel is The House at the Edge of Night.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

At the moment I’m reading several books which have just come out, or are about to. I just finished The Girls by Emma Cline, Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, and Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly. All of them are women writers who are breaking new ground in different ways – telling stories which have not yet been told, and deserve to be.

I just finished two poetry books, too: When They Broke Down the Door by Fatemeh Shams and On Jupiter Place by Nicholas Christopher, both of which reminded me that I need to read more poetry.

As an ongoing project I am also reading War and Peace, in sections, whenever I have a long journey and can spend two or three hours immersed in the story. I love the way writers like Tolstoy, the great 19th-century realists, were able to allow all kinds of characters to inhabit the space of their novel without judgement or prejudice, to create a narrator’s voice which was so expansive and assured that it could weave effortlessly between the tragic and the comic, between light and shade.

And finally, I’m rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, a direct influence on my own work and a joy as a reader. I love it, but every time I return to it it’s stranger than I remember.

Visit Catherine Banner's website.

The Page 69 Test: The House at the Edge of Night.

--Marshal Zeringue