Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch, The Secret History, The Little Friend
(Probably my favourite author of all time—The Goldfinch is the book you can
bury me with).
Hanya Yanagihara
A Little Life, To Paradise, The People in the Trees (A Little
Life tore my heart out, wrung it dry and left it in pieces. Somehow, I loved every
devastating moment).
Barbara Kingsolver
The Lacuna, Demon Copperhead, Flight Behaviour, Partita (One
of my favourite authors, though nothing else of hers has struck me quite like
the first two. I read The Lacuna soon after visiting Mexico City and Frida Kahlo’s
house, and fell completely in love with it. If I could, I would quote it daily.
Demon Copperhead feels painfully of our time: tragic, urgent and far too real).
Khaled Hosseini
A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Kite Runner (So
heartbreakingly real that they hardly feel like fiction).
Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex, The Marriage Plot (I came late to Middlesex, but
it was more than worth the wait—truly wonderful).
Elena Ferrante
The Neapolitan series (An author I return to without
hesitation. I love everything she writes).
Kristin Hannah
The Four Winds, The Nightingale, The Women (All incredible.
To me, she is a modern Steinbeck, with women’s lives and suffering at the very
heart of her stories).
Sarah Winman
When God Was a Rabbit, Still Life, Tin Man (When God Was a
Rabbit has a special place in my heart. Some books need no explanation: I
simply love it)
John Boyne
The Heart’s Invisible Furies, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,
All the Broken Places, The House of Special Purpose, A Ladder to the Sky, The
Absolutist (Please start with the first, brilliant).
Gabriel Tallent
My Absolute Darling (Incredible debut)
Delia Owens
Where the Crawdads Sing
Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie
Half of a Yellow Sun
Lauren Groff
Fates and Furies
Marlen Haushofer
The Wall (I could not put it down. A seemingly simple story
of resilience and the practical business of survival, yet it stayed with me
long after the final page)
George Orwell
Animal Farm (Of all the Orwell I read at school, this is the
one that stayed with me—my first doorway into sociology, the Russian Revolution
and the idea of revolution itself)
Miranda July
All Fours (Kinky, troubling, unbelievable and yet somehow not)
Sarah Waters
The Paying Guests, Tipping the Velvet (I’ve read a lot of
her books, all good)
Kazuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go, The Remains of the Day
Elisa Victoria
Oldladyvoice
Miranda Cowley Heller
The Paper Palace
Helen Cullen
The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually
Lara Prescott
The Secrets We Kept
Henri Charrière
Papillon (I read it as a teenager, and it has never left me)
Jeanine Cummins
American Dirt
Jonathan Franzen
Crossroads, Freedom, The Corrections (Complicated,
infuriating and extraordinary in equal measure—my admiration and exasperation
are always neck and neck)
Eliza Clark
Boy Parts (Definitely not for the faint-hearted)
Yael van der Wouden
The Safekeep
Danya Kukafka
Notes on an Execution
Hernan Diaz
Trust
Anthony Doerr
About Grace
Ann Napolitano
Hello Beautiful
Bonnie Garmus
Lessons in Chemistry
Alice Winn
In Memoriam
Michael Ondaatje
Warlight
Hervé Le Tellier
The Anomaly
Andrew Miller
The Land in Winter
James Baldwin
Giovanni’s Room
Hans Fallada
Alone in Berlin
Maggie O’Farrell
The Marriage Portrait, Hamnet
John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden
Kelly Rimmer
The Things We Cannot Say
Tara Westover
Educated
Philip Pullman
His Dark Materials trilogy (Fantasy is rarely my territory,
but the idea of a daemon companion utterly won me over)
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy Jones & The Six, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Louis de Bernières
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Birds Without Wings (I think this is where my love
of stories about war began)
Alex Garland
The Beach
Celeste Ng
Everything I Never Told You
Elif Shafak
The Island of Missing Trees
Anna Sewell
Black Beauty (The book that started it all: my first love as a reader)
Florence Knapp
The Names
Nickolas Butler
Shotgun Lovesongs
Charlotte McConaghy
Wild Dark Shore
Not an exhaustive list by any means, but some that I can recall. Reading keeps me going, always x
