Founder of Daunt Books and managing director of Waterstones picks his favourites. He will be in conversation with David Shelley, CEO of Hachette UK, at The London Book Fair on 11 March.
Palace Walk
This made a deep impression when I first read it more than 30 years ago; rereading it recently, Mahfouz's extraordinary evocation of Cairo and the iniquities of a patriarchal society hold a different but no less powerful fascination. This, the first of the trilogy, is a masterpiece.
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Rattlebone
Maxine Clair, 1994
An exquisite novel, funny, sharply observed and unsentimental, with – as one review said – magic dust sprinkled over each and every page. A tale of growing up in a black neighbourhood of Kansas City in the 1950s, it is wonderful.
A Bright Shining Lie
Neil Sheehan, 1988
History that reads like a thriller, and therefore history at its best, laying bare the trajectory of the Vietnam War through the life of one American participant, the mercurial John Paul Vann.
The Quiet Coup
Mehrsa Baradaran, 2024
The United States and the present apparent upending of political norms are given a context in clear, compelling prose. The publisher could easily have marketed this as a dystopian thriller.
The Law
Roger Vailland, 1957
A very French novel – and winner of the Prix Goncourt – about southern Italian codes of honour within a feudal society, it is searingly unsentimental and should be much better known. Read after it Norman Lewis's The Honoured Society, which remains, 60 years after its first publication, a gripping, prescient account of the Mafia.
A History of the Crusades
Steven Runciman, 1951
The mix of greed, piety, violence and soaring ambition propels this mesmerising history. It may be good advice to read only the first volume, on the improbable success of the First Crusade, for otherwise the resonance in today's world of all three is shattering.
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