Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve chosen these books because they take me to times and places I can’t go (although I did serendipitously get to Kerala, and am hoping to go to the West Coast of America one day). Girl with Two Fingers takes you into the studio, hopefully as if you could have been there yourself. I want readers to be able to share something of the experience I was so lucky to have. And to be able to see perhaps more questioningly when they look at art.


I wrote

Girl With Two Fingers

By Nicola Rose O'Hara,

Book cover of Girl With Two Fingers

What is my book about?

What was it like to stand face to face with Lucian Freud for the making of eight portraits? Six paintings…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Book of Margery Kempe

Nicola Rose O'Hara Why did I love this book?

You can’t go to the past, but the past can come to you, through a written voice. 

This is a strong and extraordinary woman’s autobiography from the late 1400s and early 1500s. It’s like taking a phone call from the 15th century.

This directness is what I wanted in my own book.

Kempe could neither read nor write, so she dictated her story. She did things women often weren’t able to do back then. She ran a business, travelled to France, Germany, Spain, and even to Jerusalem. And she spoke out against many received medieval opinions.

How brave Kempe was to challenge the patriarchy.

By Margery Kempe, Lynn Staley (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Book of Margery Kempe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Kempe's work is accompanied by an introduction, a map of medieval England, a Kempe lexicon, and explanatory annotations.

"Contexts" collects primary readings that illuminate The Book of Margery Kempe. Included are excerpts from The Constitutions of Thomas Arundel, Meditations on the Life of Christ, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, The Book of Saint Bride, and The Life of Marie d'Oignies by Jacques de Vitry.

"Criticism" includes nine varied interpretations of the autobiography, written by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Lynn Staley, Karma Lochrie, David Aers, Kathleen Ashley, Gail McMurray Gibson, Sarah Beckwith, Caroline Walker Bynum, and Nicholas Watson.

A Selected Bibliography…


Book cover of The Goldfinch

Nicola Rose O'Hara Why did I love this book?

It’s not that I can’t go to the West Coast of America, just not yet. But I feel that I have been, transported by Tartt’s evocative prose.

Although I wasn’t convinced by the voice of the narrator as a thirteen-year-old boy, I didn’t need to be, because my reader relationship was not with a fictional teenager but with the writer, and that’s the voice that carried me on the narrative journey. 

I connect with the loss of a parent, aloneness, a journey into the art world, a life of moving from place to place and not belonging, and the themes of loss and loyalty and worth.

By Donna Tartt,

Why should I read it?

12 authors picked The Goldfinch as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to the thing that most reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld. As he grows up, Theo learns to glide between the drawing rooms of the…


Book cover of The God of Small Things

Nicola Rose O'Hara Why did I love this book?

I hadn’t been to India when first I read this. 

But when I did go to Kerala, I thought I’d been there already, because it’s so exactly as Roy describes it.  She had taken me there already by word.

That’s the journey I want my readers to be able to take.

Camus said that ‘fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth’ and by that measure this is the most dazzling, intelligent, colourful and complex of ‘lies’ telling the truth about injustice, the caste system, the agony of history, and misogyny.

By Arundhati Roy,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The God of Small Things as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.'

This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother's factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun,…


Book cover of The Tempest

Nicola Rose O'Hara Why did I love this book?

I read this play first aged sixteen, and connected strongly with it, because of the young motherless shipwrecked heroine. 

I spent significant periods of time with my grandfathers when I was growing up, and I read Prospero more as a grandfather figure than a father one.

When Freud and I were in the studio for days and weeks and months together, I felt like Miranda on Prospero’s island. The same created world. The same isolation. 

With Lucian as the Prospero figure, summoning a few other characters that came and went to his studio.

No one can go to a fictional island of course, but yet Shakespeare takes us there.

By William Shakespeare,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Tempest as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 12, 13, 14, and 15.

What is this book about?

Performed variously as escapist fantasy, celebratory fiction, and political allegory, The Tempest is one of the plays in which Shakespeare's genius as a poetic dramatist found its fullest expression. Significantly, it was placed first when published in the First Folio of 1623, and is now generally seen as the playwright's most penetrating statement about his art.

Stephen Orgel's wide-ranging introduction examines changing attitudes to The Tempest, and reassesses the evidence behind the various readings. He focuses on key characters and their roles and relationships, as well as on the dramatic, historical, and political context, finding the play to be both…


Book cover of Kim

Nicola Rose O'Hara Why did I love this book?

Another 13-year-old boy protagonist, Kimball O’Hara. No relation. 

I read parts of Kim to Lucian in the studio, he liked the epigraph at the beginning of chapter five: the prodigal son does not stay comfortably in his father’s forgiving embrace, but returns ‘to the styes afresh.’

Kim is a magnificent adventure: the orphan boy who belongs but does not belong to two nations, and a description of the peoples, the ways, the mountains, and the plains of India. 

A vicarious journey around a world of the past, and a particularly male world, which Kipling takes us to.

By Rudyard Kipling,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Kim as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Kimball O’Hara grows up an orphan in the walled city of Lahore, India. Deeply devoted to an old Tibetan lama but involved in a secret mission for the British, Kim struggles to weave the strands of his life into a single pattern. Kim and the holy man roam about India. Kim’s intimate knowledge of India makes him a valuable asset to the English Secret Service, in which he wins renown while still a boy.

Charged with action and suspense, yet profoundly spiritual, Kim vividly expresses the sounds and smells, colors and characters, opulence and squalor of complex, contradictory India under…


Explore my book 😀

Girl With Two Fingers

By Nicola Rose O'Hara,

Book cover of Girl With Two Fingers

What is my book about?

What was it like to stand face to face with Lucian Freud for the making of eight portraits? Six paintings and two etchings. It’s not Memoir, remembered time, but Real Time: diaries and letters written usually on the day, and sometimes from the studio itself 1999 - 2001. Then what was it like to visit those portraits on the walls of galleries, in public? To stand again, face to face with Freud’s images of me, to watch and hear what other people see and say about the portraits that he made from me?

Like "living inside a Freud painting." The Daily Mail

Book cover of The Book of Margery Kempe
Book cover of The Goldfinch
Book cover of The God of Small Things

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Wendy Church Author Of Knife Skills

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