Writers and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the comments

I was sideswiped by Giada Scodellaro’s Ruins, Child. A brilliant, strange book that challenged me in the most exhilarating way, with its fractured language and dream-cinema visions, the sense it bestowed of walking through a corridor full of echoes. Echoes of a less elliptical but no-less political kind haunt Jordy Rosenberg’s astounding Night Night Fawn. I guess you could call it a family novel? But it’s at least as much about fascism as it is about the family – as well as about unsettling linkages between the two. And for horrors and rage in a nonfiction register, Jonas Marvin’s The Breaking of the English Working Class is an indispensable – and beautifully written – essay on decades of structural, economic and psychic violence. The feeling it provoked in me brought to mind John Berger’s phrase “undefeated despair”.

From making life hell for a young teacher to doubting the motives of a caring foster mother, Olivia Petter, Derek Owusu, Annie Lord and other writers repent for past bad behaviour

At school, I was not a good girl. Actually, that’s putting it mildly: I was an emotional terrorist hellbent on inflicting torture and humiliation on my year 6 teacher, Ms Hill, one whoopee cushion at a time. That’s how it began, anyway, but like all crimes, mine followed a strategic pattern of escalation, carefully executed alongside my best friend and accomplice.

The writer on bingeing Henry James, his friendship with Benjamin Zephaniah and a confidence-boosting classic

My earliest reading memory
When I was about four or five, I think. I was living in Long Melford, Suffolk, with my foster parents, and my foster dad was trying to teach me how to read using those Biff and Chip books.

My favourite book growing up
I never read a book until the age of 24, so there wasn’t a favourite until I was about 25, and they usually changed with every new book I read. It started with St Mawr by DH Lawrence, then EM Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and The Time Machine by HG Wells, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and then it was F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby for a very long time. But that lost its place last year when I finally read The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov.