Interview with author Donna Milner

Both Natalie and Boyer are bookworms of a sort, even if traditional education just isn't the way for them. What kinds of books do you see lining their bookshelves?

A varied selection.

Scanning Boyer's bookshelves in the 1960s these are some of the titles of non-fiction books that would jump out: A Ghost in The Machine, The Death of A President, Profiles In Courage, Vietnam: the Origins of Revolution, The Elements of Style, Poetry, a Modern Guide to Understanding and Enjoyment, Selected poems of Walt Whitman, The Complete Works of Williams Shakespeare.

An eclectic collection of novels, including: Sometimes A Great Notion, Don Quixote, Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse, Great Expectations, The Einstein Intersection, To Kill a Mocking Bird.

What are you working on now? And what books are currently lining your bookshelves?

I am working on another family story set in Vancouver in the 1960s. The story is told from two different points of view, the 12-year-old daughter and her father, a Canadian war veteran struggling to keep himself and his family together after the death of his wife.

A large number of the books lining my shelves, piled on desks, coffee and end tables, at this moment are dog-eared and battle scared research books on World War Two relating to this project. Also on my book shelves: The New Earth; Eat, Pray, Love; Alice Monroe, a Biography. And always at my fingertips, The Right To Write and Writing Down the Bones.

As for fiction, I must have, need to have, at least two novels on the go. I start to panic if there is not a least one good book waiting as I near the end of what I am currently reading. Some of those on my bookshelves right now include, The Book of Negroes, The Tenderness of Wolves, The Gift of Rain, Lullabies for Little Criminals, Lauchlin of the Bad Heart, Moral Disorder, A Map of Glass, The Known World, Mudbound, A Thousand Splendid Suns. And my current favourite: The Kite Runner. I can't overstate how much I love this novel. I've read it no less than four times over the last two years, three of those times out loud to relatives and friends. Khaled Hosseini's delicious prose makes writing look so easy. Wish it were so.

Click to read an excerpt from Donna Milner's book After River.

Part 3 of 3