The Victorian and 20th century stories are woven together with great skill - the novel manages to be academic and lyrical, analytic and romantic all at the same time.

A Month in the Country

The most perfect short novel.

J.L. Carr

- the great polemic - well served by the recent  (2005) BBC TV series but of course it does not, can not, adequately reflect Dicken's anger at the great abuses of the Law, at the poverty of the underclass of his day, at the various religious fanatics and others practising false "charity", and false Christianity.

The book, of course, is best of all, but second comes Brian Sibley's 13 hour adaptation for BBC Radio, and only then the great film trilogy which, in all but blood and battle, is comparatively thin. 

This was the first Forster novel I read - and was immediately gripped by his knowledge of people and the dreams and aspirations that influence their actions. As well as an introduction to his other novels, it began for me an enthusiasm for other novels set in India. And there's some anger there too - at the abuse of power.

The strangest book -a lot of Huxley's usual intellectual stuff but the central image is unforgettable.

Austerlitz

The best of Sebald's strange, meandering tales, novels masquerading as autobiography, with their evocative, poorly reproduced black and white photographs sustaining the illusion of truth - if illusion it be. And Sebald is interesting in non-fiction mode too - there are some interesting articles in the New Yorker about Germany at the end of WWII.

The first time I read this, I finished it late at night, sitting up in bed, with the tears running down my face, sobbing at the folly and waste.

White Teeth

NB Second novel "The Autograph Man", not nearly as good. But don't miss "White Teeth", it's got such vigour.

Among many other delights, it contains a description of an evening party, an engagement party, which conveys pure happiness as well as anything I have ever read.  Try "The Colour" too

The Poisonwood Bible

The story of a dysfunctional family but also of a dysfunctional civilisation.

Dickensian in scope, without the passion about injustice, but with greater love, perhaps, for the great wen.

Who can forget Casaubon, the dry scholar, and his deadening effect on the life of Dorothea.  GE is ess "witty" pehaps than Jane Austen, but wider ranging.

Not a well-known novelist now - but her novels are so good at evoking a vanished diplomatic past in various stations around the world - a lyrical evocation of Croatia in this one,

Stunningly moving tale set in Afghanistan and the USA - about love and honour, opportunities missed that shape a whole life - and attempts at redemption.

The grittiest of gritty realism.

The story of Chinese immigrants to London - in the take-away food business.  Cultural clashes.

A stunning re-creation of WWI in the trenches.  Most fascinating the focus on the "miners" - who dug down beneath the opposing lines to set off huge explosions.

What a revelation !  It does just what the title offers - contrasts the north and south of England - topography, activity, attitudes - embodied in the hero and heroine.  Mrs Gaskell's knowledge of the issues of the day similar to George Eliot's.  Prose not quite as sharp.

Philip Pullman

Sweeping across different but parallel worlds to our own - and the fate of all these worlds set in the context of two children growing up. Better than Harry Potter.

Set in Norway, close to the Border with Sweden, at a time running from WWII to the present.  An old man unravels the events of 60 years ago - some of them shockingly tragic.

One of the most painful books I have ever read - there's child abuse (beating) - but it is abundantly worth persevering

Helen Waddell was an academic, whose translations of the latin poems of the vagantes  in The Wandering Scholars and Medieval Latin lyrics were an early introduction to the bright attractive world of the high Middle Ages. Peter Abelard is her version of the doomed love of one of the brightest scholars of the Middle Ages and Heloise.

First Faulkner I ever read - bowled me over with its driving prose - much better than Joyce.

Surprisingly delicate.

Set in York, this is a mystery story as well as a history of the early-mid 20th century in a provincial city. Many brilliant touches - the wedding on the day of the 1966 World Cup Final is unforgettable.

This isn't perhaps Hamsun's best known novel, but it deserves attention - a parable of the growth of modern Norway through the life of one settler/farmer.

Mervyn Peake's  most enduring image is of Fuschia - the confused and ultimately betrayed adolescent.

Magical realism in Venice

A motorcycle journey to celebration and sadness.

The saddest book I have ever read

Cold Mountain

Didn't like this so much when I first read it -probably read it too fast -  second time around enjoyed the picaresque and domestic strands - cf. Pilgrim's Progress for Inman's journey ?

An immigrant story - Britain in the 50s - nostalgic in a painful sort of way

More magic - I re-read it immediately.

Just because it's so bizarre - a village of  castrati - and a homicidal maniac or two, and cannibalism, and some stuff I bet you didn't know about Germans fighting for the Soviets back around WW1.

Can't imagine how I got to be 59 yrs old before I read this.  India coming up to partition - the plight ot the Anglo-Indians - the varying attitudes of British, Anglo Indians and various Indian perspectives. And lots of railway interest!

The Model

Stunning - the limits of artistic integrity overstepped - multiple tragedy.

The Lizard Cage

Powerful evocation of suffering and martyrdom in a Burmese prison Camp

Karen Connelly

I've only just got around to Le Carré.  He is amazingingly good - and some of his political insights are spot on - he doesn't have a starry-eyed view of governments.

And the film is good too.

There's an old black and white film that I saw before I read the book. The film has an image of the hand of a dying man reaching for a butterfly on the barbed wire in no man's land, that has stayed with me ever since.

Tension.

Quirky and surreal - it was a major challenge to my A level French - I probably ended up getting about 5% of the puns and word-play.

Not really a novel, although it claims to be. But a wonderful, totally absorbing, account of growing up in South Africa mid 20th Century.

Humourous sort of science fiction - with the ultimate anti-hero.

First of the trilogy - fascinating for its re-creation of Siegfried Sassoon when he was in the mental hospital at Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, in 1917.  (Irrelevantly enough, I could see the building from my room in my first digs in Edinburgh in 1966).  And the other two are as good - maybe even no. 3 "The Ghost Road" is the best.

Just about as good as everyone says it is. Rich cast of characters - utterly convincing Northern darkness and cold. And a good mystery too.

Half of a Yellow Sun.

For those of us who were quite young when the Biafran war was goin on, this is a real eye-opener.  We all heard about starving children, but this gives so much more.  Written from a variety of viewpoints, including that of an ex-pat Englishman

The Trumpet Major

Rustic Hardy - full of humour and irony and affectionate portraiture of people and the Dorset countryside. SEt in context of the fear of Napoleonic invasion. One woman, 3 military swains.

Resistance

A what-if novel. What if in WWll the Germans had successfully invaded Britain. The men of a Welsh Valley join the resistance leaving the women to deal with the German occupation. Sheers is a poet too.

Provincial thespians.  Marvellous, darling !

Middlesex

A sweeping view of immigration into the US, from a Greek perspective - fascinating historically and a gripping plot.  I must re-read it to see if it deserves to rise up the ratings, as I suspect it does.

Nicely parallel dual plots - intricate connections

Wondrously complex - about shifting and interchangeable identities. Cast of fascinating characters weaving around the history of Istanbul.