Best books… Aravind Adiga

The Booker Prize-winning novelist chooses his favourite books. His new novel, Amnesty – a Guardian and Financial Times 2020 fiction pick – is out now, published by Picador at £16.99

The Guide

by R.K. Narayan, 1958 (Penguin £5.85). Raju, an ex-convict mistaken for a godman by gullible villagers and pampered with food and respect, begins to wonder why he shouldn’t try to become a real saint: and ends up fasting to death. Although he is often patronised by literary critics, Narayan wrote the defining allegory of modern India; the novel also inspired a gorgeous Hindi film.

In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh, 1992 (Granta £9.99). I could pick any work by Ghosh, India’s leading candidate for a Nobel prize in literature, to praise, but this early non-fiction book, which blended anthropology, autobiography and historical research in a stunning new way, showed young Indian writers that just about anything was now possible for us.

Wake in Fright

by Kenneth Cook, 1961 (Text Publishing £8.99). You don’t have to wake up in a pub somewhere in Australia with a hangover and no clear notion of how you got there to appreciate this little masterpiece, but I found that it really helped. Kenneth Cook’s terrifying novel about a young teacher’s lost weekend in the Outback was also turned into a famous Australian film.

The Romantics

by Pankaj Mishra, 1999 (Picador £10.99). Mishra’s haunting Bildungsroman guides you through the ancient mysteries of Varanasi, the most sacred of Hindu cities, and leaves you pondering a new one: why on earth has the man never again published a novel?

The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost

edited by Harold Bloom, 2007 (HarperCollins £14.99). The most memorable poetry in here is often Bloom’s own, as when he contemplates the “many enigmas” of Kipling, or the “cognitive originality” of Emerson; and who but a very great critic would find the key to Marvell’s metaphysics in the fact that he liked gardening and drinking by himself.