Lucy Hughes-Hallett picks her favourite long books

The award-winning cultural historian and novelist chooses her favourite long books. Her latest book, "The Scapegoat", a biography of the first Duke of Buckingham, is out now.

The Iliad

Homer, translated by Emily Wilson 2023

I'm celebrating long books here – ones in which the author has space to build a whole world – so let's begin with the foundational work of Western literature. Homer's epic is a war story, blazing with the hectic glamour of violence; and it's an anti-war story, grieving plangently over the horror and futility of conflict. Wilson's translation gives it new cogency.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

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.

Sign up

Available on The Week Bookshop

Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens, 1865

I'm writing about Dickens at the moment, and rereading this novel I'm struck again by the hallucinatory strangeness of its dark vision of London – corpses in the river, piles of filth mutating into money – and by the prodigious energy of Dickens's prose.

Available on The Week Bookshop

The Man on a Donkey

H.F.M Prescott, 1952

The other side of the story told in "Wolf Hall". Prescott presents the dissolution of the monasteries from the numerous interlaced viewpoints of ordinary people – nuns made homeless, devout country people bewildered, the instigators of the Pilgrimage of Grace heading towards their ghastly ends.

Available on The Week Bookshop

The Luminaries

Eleanor Catton, 2013

I took this novel with me to New Zealand once, because it's set there, and rationed myself to 50 pages a day because I couldn't bear the idea of finishing it. An intricately tangled plot about a 19th century gold rush, with a host of compelling characters.

Available on The Week Bookshop

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

Susanna Clarke, 2004

Another historical novel of a sweeping breadth. The rivalry of two magicians, one a man of the Enlightenment, the other the quintessence of the new spirit of Romanticism, set in a world where folklore and superstition speak eloquently of seismic cultural change. Clarke's fantasy is dazzlingly real.

Available on The Week Bookshop