Best books…chosen by John Wray

John Wray is the acclaimed author of Lowboy and five other novels. In his latest, Gone to the Wolves, a teenager falls for a fellow death metal fan, turning their coming of age into a unique love story—like the unique love stories Wray recommends below.

First Love and Other Stories by Ivan Turgenev (1860). Is there any more literary subject than first love? I’d say not—and Ivan Turgenev, Russian literature’s great romantic, would have agreed. First Love was his favorite of his own works, dearer to him than Fathers and Sons. He claimed to have taken it directly from his own life. It’s achingly beautiful, magnificently sad.

The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen (1938). This is first love as tragedy—nowadays one might call it trauma. Portia, a lonely 16-yearold who falls for an unsavory family friend, hurls herself into the lopsided affair like a suicide jumping into the sea. She’s not a particularly sympathetic figure. She’s as flawed and feckless as the rest of us, which is one reason the novel is a cornerstone of literary modernism.

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley (1956). Who says one’s first great love need be human? After a long-haired Alsatian named Tulip comes into his life, the arch, grouchy Ackerley is transformed before our eyes from a middle-aged London cynic into a poet of heartbreak.

G. by John Berger (1972). A true product of its time, Berger’s novel of self-liberation (some might call it promiscuity) is also one of the oddest works of fiction to win the Booker Prize. G. is a teenager when he’s seduced by his aunt, and his fall from innocence is rendered even more jarring by Berger’s impartial, omnipotent tone.

Important Artifacts by Leanne Shapton (2009). This inventive tale of love and loss is told entirely through the descriptions and photographs of a couple’s estate. Whimsical as it may sound, it’s an account of the perils of marriage that gives Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road a run for its money.

The Festival of Earthly Delights by Matt Dojny (2012). This novel brought me as much joy as any I’ve come across in the last decade. Boyd, our hopelessly WASPish yet sweet-natured hero, accompanies his fiancée to a Southeast Asian country and falls head over heels for a poker-faced local woman with an unusual birthmark. The rest is impossible to summarize without giving half the fun away.