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The Chosen by Chaim Potok is built around two fathers and two sons, and what makes it so absorbing is how completely different each father-son relationship is, and yet how recognisable both feel. One father is warm and openly communicative; the other raises his son almost entirely in silence. It’s a choice that’s genuinely difficult to understand, and Potok doesn’t try to make it easy. He gives you the logic behind it, slowly and carefully, and you come to see where it comes from without ever being able to accept it. Both approaches carry a cost, but they don’t carry equal weight, and the novel is honest enough not to pretend otherwise

What the novel captures so honestly is the tension between the world a parent has mapped out for a child and the person that child is quietly becoming. The two boys are deeply different in temperament and in what they want from their lives, and watching each of them navigate loyalty to their fathers while trying to work out who they actually are is where the book does its most affecting work. It never gets melodramatic about any of this. The struggle stays quiet, internal, which makes it hit harder.

The friendship at the centre of it is equally complicated, two people from neighbouring but quite separate worlds finding their way toward genuine understanding across a significant cultural and ideological divide.

Which fictional parent-child relationship do you think captured most honestly the cost of a child becoming someone the family never expected?

The Name of the Rose takes a while to get into. The opening sections are dense and demand a certain patience, but somewhere along the way it becomes genuinely addictive, and by the end it’s hard to believe you struggled in the beginning.

On the surface it’s a murder mystery set in a medieval Italian abbey, and it works well as one. Brother William is essentially Sherlock Holmes in a monk’s habit, his novice Adso trailing behind him doing a very credible Watson impression. The monastery itself, its hierarchy, its secrets, its strange cast of inhabitants, is one of the most vividly realised settings I’ve come across in fiction. Even in the smallest interactions you get an immediate sense of what each character holds dear and where their limits lie.

But the mystery is almost secondary to what the book is actually doing, which is asking a much more uncomfortable question: can knowledge be gatekept? And should it be? The abbey’s library sits at the centre of everything, a place of carefully controlled access where certain texts are kept from those deemed unfit to read them. The people responsible for this aren’t monsters. They have a coherent logic, a genuine belief that some ideas are too dangerous for certain minds. Eco makes you sit with that logic long enough to understand it, even as the novel is quietly pulling it apart.

It feels less like medieval history and more like something recognisably contemporary, which is probably why it has stayed with me.

It also feels like a novel that couldn’t be more timely. At a moment when book bans are accelerating and the arguments for them sound remarkably familiar, the idea that someone always believes they’re protecting others by controlling what they read, and always believes they’re the right person to make that call, lands differently than it might have a decade ago.

Which books have made you think most seriously about who gets to decide what knowledge is accessible, and to whom?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I’ve been thinking about this a lot since finishing A Separate Peace, which I read a while back and haven’t been able to put out of my head.

What makes it so uncomfortable is that there’s no real villain in it. Gene isn’t a bad person and Phineas isn’t oblivious out of cruelty. What happens between them accumulates through misreading, through assumption, through the quiet stories each of them builds about the other without ever checking if any of it holds up. Gene reads rivalry into a friendship that Phineas seems to experience as entirely uncomplicated, and that gap between their two versions of the same relationship is where everything slowly goes wrong. Knowles never exaggerates any of it, which is exactly what makes it land so hard. The jealousy sits underneath the surface, shaping things invisibly, and by the time Gene understands his own feelings well enough to say something honest, the moment for saying it has already passed. The book made me think about how much of adolescence is just this: two people who care about each other deeply, each operating on a set of assumptions the other has never actually been shown.

I read William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf around the same time, which is much less known but stayed with me in a very similar way. It follows two boys whose friendship becomes a kind of shelter for both of them, though an uneven one. The dependency runs deeper on one side, the emotional stakes are higher for one of them, and neither quite sees the imbalance clearly until it has already done its damage. Maxwell writes with enormous restraint and the prose has this quality of observing everything from a slight distance, which somehow makes the feeling underneath it more intense rather than less. What I found most affecting about Lymie in particular was how genuine his need for connection was, and how completely invisible that need remained to the person he most needed to see it.

Both books kept pulling me back to the same question.

Which fictional friendship do you think might have survived if the characters had actually been able to say what they meant to each other?

I read Strangers on a Train years ago and I still think about how it all hinges on one extraordinarily mundane thing: Guy doesn’t just get up and walk away.

Bruno is obviously unhinged from the moment he opens his mouth. He’s the kind of person who talks too much, too fast, too personally, to someone he’s only just met on a train. Any reasonable person would find an excuse to leave. Guy doesn’t. He stays, he listens, he even engages, and Highsmith never quite lets you pin down why. Is it politeness? Morbid curiosity? Some half-buried part of him that doesn’t find the idea entirely repellent? The novel refuses to answer, which is honestly what makes it so uncomfortable to read.

Guy isn’t stupid or reckless, which is the whole point. He’s passive. He drifts into catastrophe the way you drift into a bad habit, through small moments of not-quite-saying-no. Bruno doesn’t dramatically overpower him from the start. He just keeps showing up, and Guy keeps not slamming the door, and by the time the situation is irretrievable, Highsmith has made her argument almost without you noticing: complicity doesn’t tend to arrive with a bang, it just quietly accumulates.

It got me thinking about how many novels are built around this same idea, where nothing starts with a grand dramatic choice but with one small moment of not saying no when you should have. Accepting an invitation, replying to a letter, staying in a conversation five minutes too long.

What’s your favourite example of a small decision that ends up unravelling everything?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

One casual conversation on a train becomes catastrophic in Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith.
It made me think about how many great stories begin with one tiny, almost meaningless choice. What’s your favorite example in books, films, or TV where a small decision slowly spirals into catastrophe?