Best books…chosen by Charlotte Mendelson

British novelist and essayist Charlotte Mendelson is the author of Almost English, When We Were Bad, and Rhapsody in Green. Her latest novel, The Exhibitionist, was longlisted for the U.K.’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.

The Cazalet Chronicles

by Elizabeth Jane Howard (1990–2012). A panoramic unpacking of the intimate lives of three generations of one privileged family, Howard’s intricate, painful, expansive sequence of five novels is usually, stupidly, dismissed as “domestic,” a “historical saga” about the English middle class in the 1930s through ’50s. Fools: It’s a masterpiece. If the author were male, we’d all take it seriously.

Giovanni’s Room

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

Milkman

by Anna Burns (2018). Anna Burns won the Man Booker Prize 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). 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 Sayings

by Natalia Ginzburg (1963). The most insightful study of a traumatized family I know, this semi-autobiographical story about an Italian family from the rise of fascism through the aftermath of World War II is funny, loving, disconcertingly glamorous. Afterward, read about what happened to Natalia Ginzburg herself; your heart will break.

The Transit of Venus

by Shirley Hazzard (1980). The dryly brilliant Hazzard is almost wholly ignored now, but her idiosyncratic novels about longing, loss, war, and recovery are stunning. This National Book Critics Circle Award winner, about two orphaned Australian sisters starting over in England in the 1950s, is my heartbreaking favorite.