Shelf life
Award-winning Native American novelist David Hesketh Wanbli Weiden shares fi ve books that have left a lasting impression on him
David Hesketh Wanbli Weiden
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe
‘Growing up, my parents didn’t have much money for luxuries, and we often struggled to pay our bills. However, both my mother and father were compulsive readers, and I’d pick up whatever books they had and give them a read. One day, my father came home with a used set of the collected works of authors such as Wilde, Chekhov, Ibsen, and Hawthorne. Even though I was quite young, I was immediately drawn to The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe. I devoured all of the novels and stories in the book, reading them over and over. I had no idea that I was reading some of the earliest modern detective stories, especially The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Decades later, I reread Poe’s detective stories featuring the character C Auguste Dupin, and I found they were as good as I’d remembered. These tales certainly shaped my love of mysteries and genre fiction, even though I didn’t realise it at the time.’