Lynn Freed

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The Lover by Marguerite Duras (Pantheon, $10). A book that I keep within reach to remind myself of what literature can do with life. Reading more like memoir than fiction, this gorgeously written tale of erotic love, of family love, and of family hate describes a young girl’s wild passage into womanhood.

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Collected Stories by Frank O’Connor (Vintage, $21). It doesn’t matter how many times I read and reread O’Connor, I laugh, and am moved yet again by tales of an Ireland richer and more real than the one I have, on occasion, visited myself.

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Literary Occasions by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, $14). Gloriously intelligent and lucid, these essays examine the place and purpose of the writer in the world. Nothing cheers me up like Naipaul’s particular brand of unmitigated honesty.

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The Beggar Maid by Alice Munro (Vintage, $13). Rose and her stepmother, Flo, the chief protagonists of these brilliantly linked stories placed in small-town Canada, are two of the finest characters in 20th-century fiction.

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Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (Touchstone, $12). A searing, brilliantly written account of one man’s survival in a German death camp. I know of no other book that takes the reader so surely into the horror of the Holocaust without making the journey unbearable.

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Lost in Translation

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