There are so many great books which I’ve loved, it was incredibly difficult to pick just six. I’ve had to leave out some of my favourite classics, including Pride & Prejudice, but then it doesn’t really need me to recommend books like that! In some ways harder to omit are more recent books I’ve really enjoyed – the pick being Claire North’s Touch and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. The selection I have chosen though I found impossible to leave out!
The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
A quite magical book. Original and tremendously imaginative, I was totally captivated from cover to cover.
Bleak House
Charles Dickens
I could have chosen several Dickens, but this is just about my favourite. Although a rather daunting thousand pages (give or take a few), it is full of wonderful characters, twists, and one of the most famous (or infamous) legal cases in fiction. The BBC television adaption is also worth watching – it was quite brilliant.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of the several South American writers I love (with Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa), this book stands out as an epic family saga, with a bit of magical realism thrown in.
Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
I believe I was “late to the party” with this one, but it is the most amazing and gripping story (based, loosely, on the author’s own experience) of a bank robber who escapes from jail to live in the slums of Mumbai and then joins the local mafia.
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift
To be honest, I was torn between including this and Alice Through The Looking Glass (my favourite “children’s” book), but I went for Gulliver’s Travels, because over the years I keep coming back to it – the sheer inventiveness still feels fresh and relevant - and it was written in 1726!
Any Human Heart
William Boyd
My favourite author has written so many fantastic books – other favourites of mine are The Blue Afternoon and An Ice Cream War – but this one, diarising the life of a fictitious individual through the 20th Century, is moving and emotional, funny and sad, entertaining and educating. A wonderful book!