The Bookseller - Comment - The wonder years: why adults should read kids' books

On the first afternoon, I read The Story of a Brief Marriage by Anuk Arudpragasam, a meditative, poetic tale of personal connection amidst the horrors of a war-torn refugee camp. On the second I read Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a magical story of memory, childhood fears and the fallibility of parents.

Anuk Arudpragasam's protagonist, Dinesh, is engulfed in the physicality of his body and the mutilated bodies around him. Days blur as survival becomes the only ambition. Neil Gaiman's unnamed narrator finds himself negotiating a world where space, time and reality blur, where the monsters under the bed weave their way into the fabric of his life.

Reading them side-by-side, during the surreal novelty of the first and most severe lockdown, when my world had shrunk to my house and my bookshop, turned these individually brilliant books into a collective contemplation of what it means to be alive, to exist, to be human. Neither before or since have I read two books that seemed so perfectly, oddly, entwined.