Honor Jones's Desert Island Books

Featuring a lingering poetry collection, and a story where dread seeps into the domestic...

I first came across Sleep by Honor Jones after reading about it in

Pandora Sykes

’s excellent series with

Ochuko Akpovbovbo

, 2 Girls 1 Book. They both likened it to The Paper Palace—a book I absolutely adored—so I quickly ordered a copy. I read it in a single sitting one sweltering afternoon in London, but its quiet intensity has stayed with me ever since (it also has an excellent, highly Instagrammable cover).

Sleep is a novel about trauma and denial—familial, societal, and personal—and how a woman might navigate a wreckage without becoming a wreck herself. There’s a dreamlike quality to the writing, as if the entire story unfolds from beneath the blackberry bush where Margaret, the protagonist, once hid as a child, before everything changed.

I loved its sharpness, its wit, its refusal to moralise. Honor handles buried trauma and the emotional politics of divorce, motherhood, and survival with devastating nuance. Margaret’s lack of guilt or apology for leaving her “perfectly nice” husband felt refreshingly honest, and Honor has a knack for calling out the stuff most people shy away from, all while keeping things surprisingly funny.

It’s the perfect summer read—heady, quiet, and intense—and I want everyone to read it, iced coffee or Aperol Spritz (no judgement here) in hand. If you’d like to buy a copy, please consider doing so via Bookshop.org, a platform supporting local independent bookshops.

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I try to write as much as I can without a paywall, but it does take time. If you’re enjoying this post, I’d be so grateful if you would consider buying me a coffee.

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Both the best and the worst thing for me about having a new Desert Island Books guest each week is the rate at which my TBR is ever growing, and the reminders I’m served to finally read the books I’ve been pretending I already have. It’s a weekly mix of inspiration and mild panic, but one that I love regardless.

Honor’s list is a brilliant blend of books I’ve read, those I’ve been meaning to for a while, and a couple I’d never even heard of (is there anything more shameful?). From a lingering poetry collection to a story where dread quietly seeps into the domestic, read on to find out which eight books she’d take with her to the sandy shores of a desert island…

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

I just moved, and because I was desperate to get rid of the boxes, I stuffed all my books straight onto the shelves without any organizing principle whatsoever—anthologies from college next to friends’ debut novels next to cookbooks. This was a good excuse to look with fresh eyes at that jumble. Still, one of the first books I saw is a favourite: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Woolf is a really important writer to me, and I was shaken a few months back when I learned that she had been molested as a child by both her half brothers (by one brother once, when she was small, and then regularly by the other when she was a teenager, after her mother died). It’s terrible for all the reasons, of course, but I was also disturbed that I could know so much about her and not know this. I’ve gone back to her books since. I was thinking this time about how they go back to the summer house after Mrs. Ramsey dies—how there is some kind of continuation. In real life, they never went back.

Seeing Things by Seamus Heaney

I was a poetry writing major in college. Since I became a journalist, I mostly stopped reading poems in favor of novels. I guess I need the escape to other worlds that novels can offer, whereas poems tend to give you something else: this world, in all its immediacy. But Seeing Things is one collection that’s never far from my thoughts. There’s a moment in my novel that’s a tribute to a Heaney poem. The character is in a swimming pool, thinking of it as “the space in the yard that seemed to hold not just her family but time itself open within it.” I was thinking of the poem Markings when I wrote that, which describes kids staking out a soccer pitch, a white string laid out for garden beds, pale timber at right angles—all these empty spaces that become sources of meaning. “All these things entered you/ As if they were both the door and what came through it./ They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.” I think about that a lot. Both the door and what came through it.

Scar Tissue by Charles Wright

Now that I’m thinking about poetry, it’s hard to stop. Charles Wright was the poet laureate from 2014-2015 and about 10 years before that, he was one of my professors at the University of Virginia. I think he must have been the first really famous writer I’d ever met. The first poem I wrote in the class was so bad, he later admitted that he’d wondered why he’d ever let me into his classroom. He was right—the poem was awful. It had something to do with the idea that the word love was both a noun and a verb. I shudder! But he was really nice about it. I learned a lot from his poems about register, about the high and the low and how to set words against one another. Like: “What must be said can’t be said,/ It looks like; nobody has a clue,/ not even, it seems, the landscape.” And later in the same poem: “The urge toward form is the urge toward God.”

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I read this for the first time this year and remain obsessed. It would be a perfect book for a desert island because it is, in part, about creating a world—philosophically and physically—under maximally constrained circumstances. Piranesi is basically shipwrecked in a universe that consists of one mazelike house full of white sculptures. There are tides in this house, which rise and fall, and moonlight, and thirteen skeletons, and one other man, the Other. Piranesi is an innocent, a vulnerable person who has suffered deeply, and yet he’s also a scientist and a believer, someone for whom finding meaning in the world is as important as breathing. I found the book incredibly moving.

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

I just read this for the first time and I’m sure I’m going to come back to it again and again. I assumed it would be pretty daunting but it’s totally riveting and transcendent and inventive and often very funny and the ending is more terrifying than any horror movie. Yes, I sometimes blurred my eyes and skipped a page when he was telling me about the anatomy of a whale he wasn’t even hunting, but who cares? It’s a book about “interlocked terrors and wonders,” which is, of course, what all books should be about. I love the whale’s terrible silence. I don’t know if I believe in God, but I believe in that whale.

Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

I feel a little embarrassed to include this, because I saw Lidija Hilje just put it on her list for you. But I couldn’t leave it off. It’s my favorite Ferrante. I tend to be drawn to stories where dread intrudes on the domestic, but I don’t think any book does it better than this. The scope of the book is narrow—it’s about a broken marriage, a broken telephone, a broken door, a child with a virulent 24-hour stomach bug—but the stakes are so high, through every sentence.

Dory Fantasmagory by Abby Hanlon

Are my kids stuck on this desert island with me? For their sake I hope not, but if they are, I would definitely want this series. I’m kind of obsessed with it, and not just because the little girl in the story is so similar to my own daughter, from the bangs on down. She has a bunch of imaginary friends, including a fairy godmother called Mr. Nuggy, who never gets a spell right, and an imaginary villain—a witch called Mrs. Gobble Gracker. She meets the tooth fairy at one point, and she’s this hard-ass, no-nonsense, two-pack-a-day kind of woman who keeps the teeth in a clunky handbag. At one point Dory’s heart is broken because she finds out Mozart is dead. I love everything about it.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

I just wrote a piece for The Atlantic, coming out later this summer, about how much I love this book. The book begins with Magnus Pym, the double agent, running from his past. All he wants is to escape, but he can’t—everything and everyone catches up with him. I think he’d really appreciate being brought to a desert island.