Books I Love
Fiction
On Beauty – Zadie Smith
Jane Austen
Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
J.D. Salinger
The Namesake – Jhumpa Lahiri
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee (and anything else he’s written)
The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
A Sunday by the Pool in Kigali – Giles Courtemanche
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
Unless – Carol Shields (and anything else by her)
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
Between Mountains – Maggie Helwig
Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier
W.G. Sebald
Regeneration Trilogy – Pat Barker
Double Vision – Pat Barker
Border Crossing – Pat Barker
The Calligrapher – Edward Docx
Brick Lane – Monica Ali
Nowhere Man – Aleksander Hemon
Timoleon Vieta Come Home – Dan Rhodes
After You’d Gone – Maggie O’Farrell
Bel Canto – Ann Patchett
The Human Stain – Philip Roth
The Siege – Helen Dunmore
How to Be Good – Nick Hornby
New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
Paris Trance – Geoff Dyer
Anil’s Ghost – Michael Ondaatje
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting – Milan Kundera
Kolyma Tales – Varlam Shalamov
Middlemarch – George Elliot
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
This Book Will Save Your Life – A.M. Homes
Wuthering Heights – Charlotte Bronte
Poetry
Sylvia Plath
Anna Akhmatova
Elegies – Douglas Dunn
Don Paterson
Rahman Baba
Charles Bukowski
Emily Dickinson
John Burnside
Non-Fiction
An Unexpected Light – Jason Elliot
The Great War for Civilisation – Robert Fisk
Mimesis – Erich Auerbach
Straw Dogs – John Gray
A Bed for the Night – David Rieff
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning – Chris Hedges
How to Be Alone – Jonathan Franzen
The Song of the Earth – Jonathan Bate
Letters to Felice – Franz Kafka
Complete Essays – George Orwell
Changing My Mind – Zadie Smith
Economical Writing – Deirdre McCloskey
Jane Austen – Carol Shields
My Wars Are Laid Away In Books – Alfred Habegger
On Late Style – Edward Said
A Study of History – Arnold Toynbee
The Weight of a Mustard Seed – Wendell Steavenson
A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-45 – Vasily Grossman
[titles or authors in bold are special favourites]