Best books… Paula Byrne

Paula Byrne, the bestselling biographer of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, chooses her favourite books. Look to Your Wife, her debut novel, was published earlier this year by William Collins at £12.99

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934 (Penguin £7.99). Probably the best beach book of all time. Set against the luscious backdrop of the French Riviera, it follows the story of glamorous expatriate couple Dick and Nicole Diver. The writing is lush and evocative, and draws on Fitzgerald’s own marital breakdown.

Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, 1952 (Virago £8.99). A delightful, funny novel about a clergyman’s daughter and confirmed spinster. Pym is the modern Austen, tracing the lives and loves of genteel English women in ordinary circumstances.

Her canvas, like Austen’s, is small but beautifully formed.

The House of Mirth by

Edith Wharton, 1905 (Wordsworth £2.50). The heroine is lovely but impoverished Lily Bart, who battles to maintain her integrity among the heartless, corrupt members of New York’s high society. Wharton’s blend of realism, humour and pathos make this one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.

Palladian by Elizabeth Taylor (not that one!), 1946 (Virago £9.99). Taylor has to be one of the most underrated British novelists. This magnificent work rewrites Jane Eyre (with

shades of Rebecca), depicting a romance between a shy governess and her handsome, clever employer. The novel’s pitch-perfect sense of impending doom propels the plot to its terrifying conclusion.

My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, 200911 (Vintage, from £8.99 each). I have loved the six volumes of this autobiographical novel. Multiple pages are spent describing changing his daughter’s nappy, or making supper, or having his hair cut, but he makes it riveting. His prose is angst-ridden and pulsating with his feelings of embarrassment about the human condition, but is also very funny.