Book lover: Tanya Moir

Tanya Moir. Photo / Supplied

Tanya Moir is a Southland writer who recently published her début novel La Rochelle's Road (Random House, $39.99).

The book I love most is ... Illywhacker, by Peter Carey. It's one of his earlier works, but still my favourite - a real tour-de-force, full of fire and magic. Carey's a writer who can make you laugh and break your heart in the same sentence, and this is a fearless, angry, glorious novel - one that grabs a nation's idea of itself by the throat and gives it a good shake. For anyone who has ever wondered what the point of historical fiction is - read this.

The book I'm reading right now is ... Charlotte Randall's new novel Hokitika Town, and I'm finding it really difficult to put it down. I love her work - she's a razor-sharp observer who isn't afraid to push boundaries, and, like Carey, she manages to be devastatingly funny and moving all at the same time. This one's got a cracking setting in the 1865 Gold Rush, and the child narrator, Halfie, is an absolute joy.

The book I'd like to read next is ... John le Carre's Our Kind of Traitor. Well, you have to, don't you?

The book that changed me is ... Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was the book that first made me begin to think I might want to try to write fiction, so I guess you could say it changed me. It was my first encounter with magical realism - such an explosion of colour and form, like a Gaudi building made out of words. It took my breath away. I thought, so that's what can be done with language. Cool.

The book I wish I'd never read is ... I can't actually remember the title, but a horror novel I read as a teenager - my first and last foray into that genre. It involved a particularly nasty vision of what happens to you after you die ... I'll spare you the details, but let's just say there was a lot of decomposition and zombies, and not in a funny Shaun of the Dead kind of way. Once those sort of images are in your head, it's hard to get them out again. Death is hard enough to handle. Why make it scary in that way as well?