Small but perfectly formed
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,
translated by Simon Armitage
This anonymous poem, intelligently translated from Middle English, is exciting, and laced with a wry humour about its less than perfect hero.
The Great Gatsby,
F Scott Fitzgerald
The poetry of Fitzgerald’s prose turns the story of a man trying to win back a lost love in jazz-age New York into a fable about the necessary fate of dreamers everywhere.
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
An enchanted tale about Santiago, an Andalusian boy who travels to the Egyptian desert. A story about true grit, determination and how following your heart pays off.
Slaughterhouse-Five,
Kurt Vonnegut
This part memoir, part study of psychosis is not the sci-fi it’s often dismissed as. The author served in Dresden, and his recollections are evocative.
The Death of Ivan Ilych,
Leo Tolstoy
A novella about the absence of love. The doomed titular lead falls while hanging curtains and starts a slow decline. What is a life well lived?
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
What Mr Kurtz found when he was sent to govern a colonial outpost at the head of the Congo River has haunted readers (and Francis Ford Coppola) since. A dense, tense read.
The Portrait of Dorian Gray,
Oscar Wilde
This Faustian work of gothic fiction about a man who swaps his soul for a life of hedonism shows Wilde at his best, dripping with epigrams and sly, satirical humour.
Memento Mori, Muriel Spark
Packed with wit, wickedness, and flights of fancy, a series of venerable elderlies, all linked in a web of blackmail and scandal, are plagued by mysterious calls. What is at work?
Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys
An Englishwoman is all at sea in a lonely rented room in 1930s Paris, haunted by her past and unable to care for herself properly. Rhys writes with a poignant understanding of her heroine: not a novel for Pollyannas.
The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Leopard packs in a sweeping depiction of pre-unification Italy giving way to the new.
The Old Man and the Sea,
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway’s most exquisite book, in which an ageing fisherman undergoes a superhuman struggle to bag a marlin.
The Outsider, Albert Camus
However many times you read Camus’s meticulously phrased parable of a young man shooting dead another man on the beach because the sun was in his eyes, it doesn’t cease to shock.
Never Mind, Edward St Aubyn
The first of St Aubyn’s novels about his troubled alter-ego is a shocking, tender and scabrous unravelling of the horrific Melrose family as they plant the seeds of destruction in five-year-old Patrick.
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Adiga’s ingenious debut is narrated by Bengaluru businessman Balram Halwai, who reveals his rise from destitute origins to wealth and power in the Asian boom.
The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm
Malcolm, the maestro of the gripping non-fiction investigation, sets her laser-like gaze on the relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, thrillingly unpicking whether we can ever know the truth of others’ lives.
To the Lighthouse, VirginiaWoolf
Summering on the Isle of Skye, Mrs Ramsay promises her young son they’ll venture to the local lighthouse. Mr Ramsay expresses doubt. From the shimmering intricacies of this moment, Woolf weaves a magical history of inner lives.