Joe Dunthorne: ‘Growing up in Swansea, I developed an allergy to Dylan Thomas’

The author on feeling Thomas Hardy’s pain, being duped by Donna Tartt and how reading his sister’s copy of Trainspotting made him want to write My earliest reading memory I only realised how well I knew the Alfie stories by Shirley Hughes when I started reading them to my own children. Every time we read one now, I’m suddenly back in my attic room in Swansea 40 years ago, watching my dad turn the same pages. My favourite book growing up At 10 years old, I read only Terry Pratchett. As far as I was concerned, there were no other authors. I loved everything he wrote but my favourite was Mort, where the eponymous protagonist is Death’s young apprentice. He learns the skills of the trade: traipsing between appointments, meeting the soon-to-die and reaping their souls. I liked how it made the afterlife seem ordinary, even bureaucratic, with the Grim Reaper more like a taxman – unwelcome wherever he goes. The book that changed me as a teenager Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy was a set text at school and that alone would normally have been enough to make me suspicious. But something about this book cut through. Tess was the first fictional character I properly