The author of the Women's Prize-winning "A Girl is a Half-formed Thing" chooses her six favourites. Her latest novel, "The City Changes Its Face" – a love story set in 1990s London – is published this week.
The Transylvanian Trilogy
Miklós Bánffy, 1934-1940
A cross between Proust and Tolstoy, this is the story of a doomed love affair and a doomed artist in the last years of the doomed Habsburg empire. A compulsively readable "Oh, how we fiddled while Rome burned" epic.
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Time and Tide
Edna O'Brien, 1992
This is another gem, among a number of under-appreciated novels waiting to be rediscovered, in the author's back catalogue. There's a great deal of sadness in it, but the lyric beauty of Edna O'Brien's prose radiates through and wards off sentimentality.
Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook
Antony Sher, 1985
An utterly brilliant piece of theatre writing from the one of the greatest Shakespearian actors of the past century, sharing insights into, and detailing the preparations for, his landmark performance of Richard III.
The Quest for Christa T.
Christa Wolf, 1968
A fragmented, wrenching, experimental novel in which a woman reconstructs her friend's life after her early death. But not only. It's also an exploration of the ills of Germany, from the Second World War up to the GDR in the 1960s.
Dracula
Bram Stoker, 1897
This doesn't really need an introduction, but it was my teenage introduction to the wonderful world of Irish gothic fiction and I've been dabbling in it ever since. Sex, death, foreign travel, corsets and vampires – what else does a novel need?
Resurrection
Leo Tolstoy, 1899
While also containing sex and corsets, this is quite different and one of Tolstoy's finest. An attack on hypocrisy, the abuse of power and injustice, it was a personal exorcism of sorts for the writer himself and remains a profoundly moving read.
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