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]