Open this photo in gallery Peter Carey.

Australian Peter Carey is the author of 14 novels including his latest, A Long Way From Home (Knopf) and one of a handful of writers to have twice won the Man Booker Prize. Here, Carey, who started working in advertising and as a creative-writing teacher before accumulating literary accolades, shares five books from various points in his life that have made lasting impressions:

The Magic Pudding is a great discursive, funny adventure of the 1930s complete with villainous wombats, sea shanties and the consolation that, in the midst of the Great Depression, no one need go hungry. I can still hear it whispering from between the lines of my second novel, Illywhacker.





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On the only occasion I ever saw my father with a book, he purchased four Biggles novels, which we read in glorious companionship. My dad always checked out the endings first, just to reassure himself that Biggles hadn’t died. This was a life lesson: A novelist cannot control what a reader does with all that careful structuring.





At an age when my contemporaries were in the thrall of Catcher in the Rye, I could be found with my nose in commercial bestsellers like Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea. I read with acute sensitivity toward any sign of sexual intercourse which, this being the 1950s, would have occurred just off the dog-eared page.

And then, dear Jesus, I discovered William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and I was drunk on the lapidary language and the joys of duelling perceptions. They say, “don’t try this at home.” But I did, and do.

Years later came W.G. Sebald, the greatest writer of our time. I still read and reread The Rings of Saturn, pleased that I am now of an age where I can be free of the sucking whirlpool of unhelpful influence.