Michael Amherst‘s The Boyhood of Cain originally came out in March 2025. Now, the paperback of the book, which André Aciman called “A powerful, searing tale told by a boy facing the plenitude of life but hemmed in by a world so…ordinary that he can’t wait either to flee it or be drowned in it,” has been released.
We chatted with Amherst a year ago when the hardcover of The Boyhood of Cain came out. Now, we’ve asked him to answer our reucrring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped his life and influenced his writing.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
I grew up with a lot of Bible stories – a children’s illustrated Bible – and remember being fascinated by the horror of much the Old Testament. But I think the first book, other than that, was Jill Tomlinson’s The Owl who was Afraid of the Dark. I used to find it hard getting to sleep as a child, so my parents bought me the audio cassette. It was read beautifully by an English actress, Maureen Lipman, and goes through seven chapters of different reasons why Plop, this baby barn owl, needn’t be afraid of the dark. The final chapter, in which he sits of the roof tops and admires the winter sky along with a black cat is breathtaking. I then graduated to reading it on my own. But still – years later – I will listen to that Maureen Lipman recording. It is simply stunning.
What book helped you through puberty?
I went through a phase during puberty where I stopped reading. I don’t really know why. Maybe it was a pause between the children’s classics I had been reading and genuine ‘adult’ fiction. In the intervening period I watched a lot of TV and listened to a lot of comedy. The comic Victoria Wood was a key influence on me then. I only got back into reading for pleasure aged around 15. We were doing the War Poets at school and I struggled to engage with them. My aunt recommended Pat Barker’s Regeneration and it really spoke to me – against this backdrop of the sheer horror of what was taking place in the trenches, Siegfried Sassoon is treated by William Rivers at Craiglockhart Hospital. I was very conflicted and confused as a teenager and here was a book describing psychoanalysis, or something very like it, and the hidden reasons and meanings behind our actions, as well as the way we cope in the face of trauma.
What book do you wish 18-year-old you had read?
In many ways I feel very lucky – I think I did read what I needed to at 18. I found Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, which somehow felt very relatable and also blew my mind with its amorality and how implicated, accepting, it makes you as a reader. I also read a lot of Graham Greene and loved the moral complexity he describes. John Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Toni Morrison Beloved. Perhaps I wish I’d discovered plays at that age: it was only at university I saw or read Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams. I wish I’d had them in my teens.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?
Over the last year or so I have become obsessed with Flannery O’Connor. Not just her stories, but The Violent Bear it Away, which I think is her masterpiece and a masterpiece that stands up against all-comers. I’d also recommend her essays, Mystery and Manners, which has such good advice on writing and is utterly unpretentious. It is also wonderful reading someone who not only takes writing seriously but is prepared to be very direct and firm in their beliefs.
Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier – is to my mind the closest thing there is to a perfect novel. It is unsurpassed. I’ve reread it more than any other book and every time I am apprehensive it will disappoint and it never does. The whole novel is just so elusive – it is rich with detail and yet the emotions of it, or sense of what is ‘true’, breaks up before your eyes.
John Cheever’s Collected Stories – to see how transcendence and the everyday can coexist in a story. But also the elevated, poetic moments of his prose and how he integrates them. Any JM Coetzee for the momentum he achieves with the present tense, combined with an almost constant, deep reflexivity.
Katherine Mansfield – for what she does with point of view and the ease and speed with which she jumps from one to another. Particularly in ‘Prelude’, ‘Bliss’ and ‘At the Bay’.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
JM Coetzee’s Boyhood was a key influence, as well as his Jesus trilogy for that voice of an incessantly questioning child. I’ve always loved and been drawn to Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room and there is something about the narrative propulsion he achieves in a novel that is also very reflective, even languorous, which was useful. And there were certain bits where specific stories helped – the sudden sense of difference between boys owes a lot to James Baldwin’s ‘The Outing’. And I always forget but John Steinbeck’s East of Eden was a constant presence in the background.
What books are on your nightstand now?
I’ve just finished Mary Costello’s A Beautiful Loan, which is about to come out. I hugely admire her writing and I love this new novel. It gives such a rich description of all it means to be human, in the face of increasingly diminished definitions coming from AI and Big Tech. I’m now reading Daniel Saldaña Paris’ The Dance and the Fire. And I also have John Cheever’s Bullet Park and Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, both of which I’m rereading to help with my new book.