Julian Barnes' 6 favorite books that deserve all their praise

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Julian Barnes is the Booker Prize–winning author of "Flaubert’s Parrot," "The Sense of an Ending" and 12 other novels. His most recent, "Elizabeth Finch," charts its narrator’s long obsession with a woman who taught his adult education class on cultural history.

'The Widow Couderc' by Georges Simenon (1942)

Every year, Simenon would rage at the “idiots of Stockholm” who yet again had refused him the Nobel Prize in literature. I used to think this was crazy; now I think it quite sane. His romans durs are spare and harsh, with a deep understanding of human nature; this is one of his finest. Buy it here.

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'Boys in Zinc' (or Zinky Boys) by Svetlana Alexievich (1989)

Alexievich did win the Nobel, and rightly, in 2015, for her polyphonic oral histories of the end of Soviet Communism. "Boys in Zinc," about the terrifying experiences of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, was the first to be translated into English. Later she assembled voices from Chernobyl, and the experiences of women and children in wartime. buy it here.

'The Beginning of Spring' by Penelope Fitzgerald (1988)

Set in pre-Revolution Russia, this is the finest of Fitzgerald’s four great final novels. Wry, wrong-footing, wise and tender toward the incompetent, Fitzgerald’s fiction has a moral grace that will outlast most flashier fiction of our age. "But how does she know all that?" we are often left thinking. Buy it here. 

'Persuasion' by Jane Austen (1817)

My favorite three 19th-century English novels are by women, Middlemarch and Jane Eyre being the other two. Persuasion is Austen’s last novel, dark, ironic and intense. Imagine what she’d have written had she not died at 41. Buy it here. 

'Amours de Voyage' by Arthur Hugh Clough (1849)

A great long poem and also a great short novel — about love, doubt and travel; about failing to seize the day; about misreading, overanalyzing and moral cowardice. Clough was "unpoetical," according to his friend Matthew Arnold, which I take as an unintended compliment. Clough is contemplative, argumentative, witty and fiercely modern. Buy it here. 

'Ethan Frome' by Edith Wharton (1911)

Wharton said this was "the book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease." With most editions running scarcely more than 100 pages, it combines the novel’s density of character and theme with the fleshlessness and onrush of a short story. Like many of her books, a tragedy for a non-tragic age. And she originally wrote it in French! Buy it here. 

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