Best books… Elizabeth Strout

The Pulitzer-winning author Elizabeth Strout selects six favourite books. Her new book, a collection of interconnected short stories titled Anything is Possible, is available from Viking at £12.99.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, 1948 (out of print). This book just blew me away because of its voice. It’s an account of a man in Japan whose sense of alienation is so profound he attempts suicide. Others might consider the book relentlessly grim, but I love it because that voice is so strong and so pure.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925 (Vintage £7.99). I have re-read this book every few years since my 20s, and it seems different each time. Clarissa Dalloway – deciding to get the flowers herself, as the book opens – seemed in my youth to be a lovely woman. As I grew older, I saw the sadness that beats in her heart.

Another Country by James Baldwin, 1962 (Penguin £9.99). Many years ago, when I first read Baldwin’s novel about a doomed Greenwich Village jazz drummer, I thought, “Wow, I can’t believe it. The narrator is so fierce and strong, and the book pulsates with such honesty. The language!”

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, 1940 (Cornerstone £7.99). I have loved Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War epic since I was 17, and each time I come back to it, it surprises me.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro, 2001 (Vintage £9.99). Munro brings such authority to the page that I will follow her anywhere. And I’m never disappointed. In the title story, she moves the point of view with such ease all around a small Canadian prairie town.

Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969 (Vintage £8.99). I came to this book later in life. Among other things, it is the loveliest, most delicate account of post-traumatic stress I’ve ever read – like the water that simply runs from the eyes of Billy Pilgrim.