Best books… Rupert Thomson

Rupert Thomson, whose novel The Insult was chosen by David Bowie as one of his top 100 reads, picks his all-time favourites. He is talking about his new novel, Never Anyone But You, at the Edinburgh Festival on 25 August

Giving up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel, 2003 (Fourth Estate £8.99). Mantel has never been more psychologically acute than she is in this highly charged, intensely moving and sometimes eerie memoir. Although her life has not been easy, she is brave and generous enough to give us glimpses into the darkest corners of her mind, the place where her brilliant writing originates.

Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, 1990 (Verba Mundi £12.76). This slim masterpiece begins on a hot August afternoon in the bar of a Milan hotel, where the narrator discovers that a woman he used to know

committed suicide only days before. Drawing on film noir and detective fiction, Modiano cuts between two stories of disappearance that are rooted in the corrupt and dangerous world of France during the Nazi occupation.

The Third Policeman by Flann O’brien, 1967 (Harper Perennial £8.99). I came across this darkly comic novel as a 16-year-old, and fell in love with its humour and its surreal, Kafkaesque take on the world. Policemen and bicycles: what more could any reader want?

Machine Dreams by Jayne Anne Phillips, 1984 (Vintage £10.99). Writing with characteristic intensity

and lyricism, Phillips charts the effects of the Depression and the Vietnam War on a smalltown American family, the Hampsons. An epic but also intimate novel, and one that is hard to forget.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, 1981 (Faber £8.99). Robinson tells the story of two young sisters growing up with their disturbed Aunt Sylvie in a remote Idaho community called Fingerbone. While the theme – a child’s poignant attempt to make sense of a world ruled by madness and abandonment – may be bleak, the writing is so wise and poetic that the book becomes a real hymn to life.