The Ballad and the Source

by Rosamond Lehmann, 1944 (Virago £15). I love all Lehmann’s novels but this – the most melodramatic of all – has always cast the most powerful spell. The story of Sibyl Jardine, a woman who loses contact with her daughter after an adulterous affair, it is a devastating meditation on memory, loss and motherhood.

Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal, 2014 (MacLehose Press £8.99). One of the most original books I’ve encountered in recent years, de Kerangal’s novel traces 24 hours in the life of a human heart as it is transplanted from one body to another. In the process, she finds an incredible poetry in the vocabulary of medicine and surgery.

The Snakes by Sadie Jones, 2019 (Chatto & Windus £14.99). What starts as a thriller set in a desolate, isolated French country hotel snowballs into an exploration of the psychopathology of the super-rich. A slow-burner which builds to a shocking, bleak climax.

Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang, 2017 (Bloomsbury £8.99). Zhang is a new name to me, but what a discovery! These interlinked stories follow the lives of young Chinese immigrants struggling to make sense of life in modern America. They are intense, unsettling, occasionally filthy and often wildly funny.

The Summer House:

A Trilogy by Alice Thomas Ellis, 1991 (Paul Dry Books £13.46). I owe an enormous debt to Alice Thomas Ellis (real name Anna Haycraft). As fiction editor at Duckworth, in 1986 she plucked my first novel from the slush pile and turned me from a literary wannabe into a published writer. She also wrote strange, darkly humorous novels: this one, in which the same events are told from three different points of view, is a savage and mordant take on marital expectations.