Best books… Jill Dawson

The bestselling novelist Jill Dawson picks her six favourite reads. Her latest novel, The Crime Writer – about the author Patricia Highsmith – is published in paperback by Sceptre at £8.99

A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge, 1976 (Virago £8.99). An autobiographical tale about a young girl stuck in a bleak home and her affair with a German POW. There is no one like Beryl Bainbridge. Hard-drinking and smoking, darkly humorous; in her novels she relished the absurd, the inexplicable, the candid and the violent.

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, 1988 (Virago £9.99). I’m a big Atwood fan and can’t easily pick a favourite. But in Cat’s Eye she nails the cruelty of girls’ friendships. I read it with a shock of recognition.

French at A level and this is one of the few novels I’ve read in French. The idea that Camus was writing about one thing (German occupation) in the guise of another (a plague), thrilled me as a 16-year-old reader. This is the novel that made me want to be a writer.

Sula by Toni Morrison, 1973 (Vintage £8.99). Sula is about two black girls: clever and poor, wishbone thin and pretty. They grow up in small-town America until Sula breaks free. Morrison’s writing about friendship, bereavement and especially sex in this novel is stunning. She can convey the pain of heartbreak in just a few lines; everything Morrison does is brilliant.

Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

by Irvin Yalom, 1989 (Penguin £9.99). This is an account of ten cases treated by the psychotherapist and novelist Irvin Yalom. The title story concerns a therapist addressing a 70-year-old patient’s delusions of love. I’ve read everything by Yalom.

Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience

by Laurence Gonzales, 2012 (Norton £12.99). This book about people surviving extraordinary experiences – from being attacked by a bear to being left for dead by a violent husband – is not as harrowing as it sounds. It is moving and oddly consoling.