Best books… Sally Rooney

The Irish writer Sally Rooney picks her favourite books. Her novel Conversations with Friends is shortlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times/pfd Young Writer of the Year award. The winner is announced on 8 December

Emma by Jane Austen, 1815 (Penguin £4.99). For its fine observation, comic brilliance and spectacularly deft grip on the reader’s sympathies, Emma is for me Austen’s masterpiece. It’s a novel that always manages to make me care a huge amount about very little.

Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922 (Penguin £9.99). It took me a long time to finish this lengthy and at times difficult book, by which point I felt I had really earned the astonishing and incomparable beauty of its closing pages.

Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger, 1961 (Penguin £8.99). A story about a young woman going through a minor nervous breakdown, and her older brother, by turns sympathetic and irritable, trying to offer some help. This is the book I reread more often than any other.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (4th Estate £9.99). The first time I tried to read this groundbreaking 1962 novel, I had to put it down because it was too unsettling. When I did finally finish it, I concluded it was a work of genius.

10:04 by Ben Lerner, 2014 (Granta £8.99). A dazzling meditation on illness, art, intimacy and literature. It’s also sublimely funny.

NW by Zadie Smith, 2012 (Penguin £8.99). Smith’s fourth novel gives us the fragmented stories of four Londoners, each of whom grew up on the same council estate, as they navigate adult life in Willesden. NW is not only joyfully experimental in form, but daring and unexpected in its content too.

My Documents by Alejandro Zambra, 2015 (Fitzcarraldo Editions £12.99). This collection of short stories, in an excellent translation by Megan Mcdowell, confronts the reality (and unreality) of recent Chilean history. Unsettling, astute and at times horrifying, this is a book that stays with the reader long after the final page.