Book of a Lifetime: Lady with a Lapdog by Anton Chekhov

When I was about 30, I discovered Chekhov. A bit late in the day, admittedly, but I’d gone with a friend to see The Seagull and we were so blown away that we resolved to read everything he had ever written. We went on a kind of Chekhov binge, swapping books, recommending stories, even reading collections of his “amusing” (totally unamusing actually) pieces for papers and magazines that he wrote when he was young.

It was a fascinating exercise because it made me realise that you could write complete crap when you were young, but, if you worked hard enough at it, eventually there was a chance that you could write something as brilliant as the story which, to me, is the best story in the entire world: “Lady with a Lapdog”.