Shelfies #39: Helen Marshall

Mounting a bookshelf above my bed was possibly the best life decision I’ve ever made. No more fumbling for the bedside lamp or knocking over water glasses—just pure literary accessibility in that drowsy space between waking and dreaming. So I want to share four books from this collection that have fundamentally shaped how I think about storytelling, especially as I was writing my most recent novel The Lady, The Tiger and the Girl Who Loved Death.

The fiction of Kelly Link sits at the heart of my understanding of how stories work. Link has this incredible gift for what I think of as "nighttime logic"—that associative, metaphorical way of thinking that feels more true than rational thought sometimes. Her stories move like dreams, haunting, wondrous, frightening, and strange. This nighttime logic became essential to how I approached my own writing where the line between illusion and reality deliberately blurs. I’ve picked out her first novel The Book of Love because it does all these things beautifully!

Right beside it is The Two Mad Sisters of Esi by Tashan Mehta, a book I gush about in interviews because I genuinely think it's perfect. I read a draft during the pandemic, and it felt like discovering a secret. Imagine Piranesi meets The Time Traveler’s Wife, but entirely its own glorious thing: two girls living in a whale made of dreams, exploring what it means to love across impossible distances. Tashan is a dear friend, but friendship aside, this book taught me about audacity in storytelling. Sometimes you have to trust readers to follow you into the whale.

Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova has been read and re-read until my copy is practically falling apart. Kassabova writes about border regions with this haunting precision—places where history bleeds through the present, where folklore and politics intertwine. This book was crucial inspiration for the Eastern European setting I've been exploring, that “nowhere land” where ancient forests hold mysteries and fairy tales have sharp political teeth. Kassabova showed me how geography can become character.

Finally, there’s The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson, which might seem like an odd addition but represents everything I love about gonzo non-fiction. Ronson manages to be funny, incredibly smart, and surprisingly humane all at once while investigating the U.S. military’s psychic warfare programs. His ability to find the absurd in the deadly serious—and the serious in the absurd—influenced how I approached the political spectacle in my own work. Sometimes the most effective way to examine power is to show how ridiculous it can be.

These books remind me why I write, how stories can offer ways of understanding the world rather than escaping from it. They live above my bed because they’re the conversations I want to fall asleep and wake up to—reminders that the best stories don’t just entertain. They change how we see.

Dr Helen Marshall is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. She has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award for her three collections of short stories. Her debut novel The Migration argued for the need to remain hopeful, even in the worst circumstances. It was one of The Guardian’s top science fiction books of the year. Her second novel The Lady, the Tiger and the Girl who Loved Death is out now.

Shelfies is edited by Lavie Tidhar and Jared Shurin. Find more shelfies on Instagram at @shelfiesplease.