Room for all aboard ... A family of Harry Potter fans. Photograph: Linda Nylind
Sometimes it's depressing being a crossover novelist. It always sounds as if I've had a sex change operation, or raises some sort of transatlantic question, as in "so you write in American and English?"
Even I'm not sure exactly what the term means, apart from indicating books suitable for adult and teenage readers, which (if you ask me) is a pretty wide-open category. But everyone acts as if the genre were invented yesterday, possibly by Mark Haddon, JK Rowling or one of the big publishers with an eye for a quick buck.
In fact it's a venerable literary tradition: young man or woman on the brink of independence/sexual knowledge/adulthood. Think of Fielding's Tom Jones, Wharton's The Age of Innocence. Pride and Prejudice, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and much of Dickens (David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby) also fit the category. On my list of must-read crossover books are Alice in Wonderland, The Brothers Karamazov, Sons and Lovers, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Portnoy's Complaint, and A Separate Peace (John Knowles). Not to mention the fantastic graphic novels like Fun Home (Alison Bectel), Maus (Art Spiegelman) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis.
The list goes on and on, for the simple reason that a good coming-of-age novel is about as classic a form as a good political thriller, or a good murder mystery. I've snuck all sorts of midlife crises into crossover novels, and they fit remarkably well. Because if anyone knows the feeling of being lost, alone and unloveable, it's a teenager. Or a 50-year-old divorcee. The gaining of wisdom is one of those subjects that plays and plays.
Of course, once you start sharing books with your teenagers, you're in danger of discovering all sorts of common ground. There are the original James Bond books (who's more obsessed with spies, sex, and fast cars than the average 15-year-old?), Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Every 12-year-old I know loves The DaVinci Code. You might even want to try some of the stuff publishers are selling as crossover - Siobhan Dowd's A Swift Pure Cry, Jenny Downham's Before I Die, and Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief.
That's enough of a list for today. I'll take your suggestions now. Or ask your kids for theirs.
