Best books… Sabine Durrant

Novelist and journalist Sabine Durrant picks her six favourite books. Her latest book, Lie With Me, is a psychological thriller, published by Mulholland Books at £14.99

The King of a Rainy Country by Brigid Brophy, 1956 (The Coelacanth Press £10). A brilliant coming-of-age novel, set in grey London and dazzling Venice, about love and identity, passion and uncertainty. Brophy’s prose is simple and spare, her observations intense. She was the queen of ambiguity, years ahead of her time.

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch, 1973 (Vintage £9.99). Bradley Pearson, a “blocked” writer, has retired to the country for inspiration. Like all of Murdoch’s work, the story is rich with idea and metaphor, and its structure ingenious, but the heart is this wonderfully grotesque anti-hero.

Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, 1988 (Vintage £8.99). A single car journey and a relationship laid bare; no one else unpicks as neatly as Tyler the tiny poignant details that make up the texture of married life.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, 1965 (Penguin £8.99). A “non-fiction novel”, written in collaboration with Harper Lee, this is an extraordinarily eloquent and psychologically rich dissection of a quadruple murder; the victims and the perpetrators, the causes and the repercussions.

Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1871 (Penguin £6.99). The greatest novel ever written: a richly teeming portrait of a provincial world, but also a study of the role of women, and men, in Victorian society. At the heart is Dorothea and her husband, the stick-like Casaubon, who make your heart bleed.

Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton, 1941 (Penguin £9.99). In the seedy, fag-swathed backstreet saloons of Earl’s Court, George Harvey Bone is adrift on booze and unrequited passion. It’s 1939 and war is on the cards. So too is murder. You can’t put it down.