Favourite Classics

Jane Austen: Especially Persuasion and Mansfield Park, and maybe Emma

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White, The Moonstone

Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, David Copperfield

Ford Maddox Ford: The Good Soldier

Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, Daisy Miller 

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Favourite Modern Classics

Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca

F Scott Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night, The Pat Hobby Stories

Stella Gibbons: Cold Comfort Farm

Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Scot’s Quair

Alasdair Gray: Lanark

LP Hartley: The Go Between

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita, Pale Fire

JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye

Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Favourite Historical Novels

Sebastian Barry: A Long, Long Way

William Boyd: Any Human Heart

Peter Carey: The True History of the Kelly Gang

Michel Faber: The Crimson Petal and the White

Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

Charles Palliser: The Quincunx, Betrayals

Patrick Süskind: Perfume

Rose Tremain: Restoration

Sarah Waters: Fingersmith

Favourite Comic Works

Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim

Richmal Crompton: Just William

John Irving: The World According to Garp

Flann O’Brien: The Best of Myles Na Gopaleen

Geoffery Williams and Ronald Searle: The Molesworth Series

Favourite Genre Fiction

Raymond Chandler: Everything, especially The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely

Thomas Harris: The Silence of the Lambs

Stephen King: Misery

Barbara Vine: A Fatal Inversion, Asta’s Book

Recent Favourites

Brett Easton Ellis: Less Than Zero, American Psycho

Jonathan Franzen: The Corrections, Freedom

Zoe Heller: Notes on a Scandal

Alan Hollinghurst: The Line of Beauty

John Lanchester: The Debt to Pleasure

Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy

Rick Moody: The Ice Storm

Carol Shields: Happenstance

Jane Smiley: The Thousand Acres

Donna Tartt: The Secret History

Anne Tyler: Everything, but especially The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Breathing Lessons, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, The Ladder of Years.

John Updike: Couples, Short Stories

Favourite Short Story Authors

Angela Carter
Raymond Carver
Henry James
Guy de Maupassant
Alice Munro
Flannery O’Connor
Damon Runyan
Saki