Best books… Charlotte Mendelson

The award-winning novelist chooses her six favourite books. Her latest novel, The Exhibitionist (Pan Macmillan £16.99) – long-listed for The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2022 – is out now

The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, 19902013 (Pan Macmillan £9.99 each). A panoramic unpicking of the intimate lives of generations of one family, Howard’s intricate, painful, expansive sequence of five novels is usually, stupidly, dismissed as “domestic”, a “historical saga” about the middle class. Fools; it’s a masterpiece. If the author were male, we’d all take it seriously.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, 1956 (Penguin £7.99). Baldwin, a gay black American, knew Otherness; his writing about race is electrifying, but this short, harrowing novel about an Italian waiter in Paris is unparalleled for its understanding of fear, poverty, passion and the end of love.

Milkman by Anna Burns, 2018 (Faber £8.99). Burns won the Booker for this dazzlingly bold, utterly true study of domestic terrorism, oppression, gossip, religion, sexuality and young womanhood, based on but not confined to the Troubles. I, always a late adopter, have only just discovered why.

Villette by Charlotte Brontë, 1853 (Wordsworth £2.99).

I am an evangelist for this devastating masterpiece. Jane Eyre is the milksop sibling to Villette’s Lucy Snowe, the introvert’s introvert: brainy, passionate and dark. It’s a love story, a hate story, an adventure and the most extraordinary portrait of an inner life. The ending will kill you.

Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, 1963 (Daunt Books £9.99). The most insightful study of a traumatised family I know, yet it’s funny, loving, disconcertingly glamorous. Afterwards, read about Ginzburg herself; your heart will break.

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, 1980 (Virago £9.99). The drily brilliant Australian Hazzard is almost wholly ignored now, but her idiosyncratic novels about longing, loss, war and recovery are stunning, and this is my heartbreaking favourite.