Emerald Fennell: my six best books
The actress and writer chooses her favourite books, from Jane Austen to Nick Cave

Francis Spufford’s latest novel, Light Perpetual (Faber £16.99), has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Light Perpetual is available at The Week Bookshop for £13.99.
He will speak at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 27 August (edbookfest.co.uk).
Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1871
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Clever girl mistakes boring man for genius; learns better. But there’s a whole world inside George Eliot’s masterpiece, observed with apparently limitless empathy, along with a streak of surprisingly bitchy humour. Virginia Woolf called it “one of the few novels written for grown-ups”, and 150 years after it came out it still makes almost everything else look simple-minded. Penguin £6.99; The Week Bookshop £5.99
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, 2004
The minister of a small-town church in 1950s America writes a letter to the son he won’t live to see grow up, and finds he has another task before he can die. Wise, radiantly written, and full of something you don’t get much of in novels: holiness. Virago £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
One of the greatest of sci-fi novels by one of the greatest of science fiction writers, set on an ice-bound planet whose inhabitants are human but, for 28 days of the month, genderless. It’s dated in some ways, but it remains one of the richest and most beautiful explorations of strangeness there is. Gollancz £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, 2007
Delicious noir detective story, set in a timeline that never was, where the survivors of the Holocaust founded their Jewish state in Alaska, not Israel. As a piece of writing, the most purely pleasurable book I know, every sentence its own delicatessen. Harper Perennial £10.99; The Week Bookshop £8.99
NW by Zadie Smith, 2012
The city of London, or at least the northwest quadrant of it, brought brilliantly onto the page through the voices of four linked characters, all once children of the same council estate. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, always astonishingly constructed, with dialogue like a stethoscope pressed to the city. Penguin £8.99; The Week Bookshop £6.99
The Week Bookshop
Titles in print are available from theweekbookshop.co.uk on 020-3176 3835. For out-of-print books visit biblio.co.uk
-
What is 'career catfishing' and why are Gen Z doing it?
Under The Radar Successful job applicants are increasingly disappearing before their first day
-
The countries around the world without jury trials
The Explainer Legal systems in much of continental Europe and Asia do not rely on randomly selected members of the public
-
How did the Wagner Group recruit young British men for arson attack?
Today's Big Question Russian operatives have been using encrypted messaging apps to groom saboteurs across Europe
-
Diane Arbus' Constellation is the largest-ever collection of her work
Feature Park Avenue Armory, New York City, through Aug. 17
-
July fiction: Summers to remember
Feature Featuring the latest summer-themed novels from Darrow Farr, Lucas Schaefer, and more
-
Jeff in Venice: a 'triumph of tackiness'?
In the Spotlight Locals protest as Bezos uses the city as a 'private amusement park' for his wedding celebrations
-
The Anatomy of Painting: Jenny Saville's 'stunning' retrospective
The Week Recommends Saville's new collection features 'masterpieces' from throughout her career
-
M3GAN 2.0: riotous action sequel to the comedy-horror hit about a killer doll
The Week Recommends A 'ridiculously' entertaining 'hyper-camp mash-up' of Terminator 2 and Mission: Impossible
-
Properties of the week: bright and cheerful houses
The Week Recommends Featuring homes in Cornwall, London and Norfolk
-
Shami Chakrabarti picks her favourite books
The Week Recommends The politician and human rights activist shares the polemics that inspired her
-
6 sleek homes for modernists
Feature Featuring a concrete-and-steel home in South Carolina and a renovated 19th-century former carriage house in Pennsylvania