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
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.
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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
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