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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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