Niall Williams shares his favourite books

The Irish novelist and playwright chooses his five favourite books. His latest novel, "Time of the Child", is out now.

Station Island

Seamus Heaney, 1984

Seamus's are the books most taken down from the shelf. There are three sections in this volume, but it's the 33-page title poem that seems to me a masterpiece. It is a narrative sequence, both confessional and dramatic, and has the questing urgency of all pilgrimage, to arrive at a place of peace.

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Available on The Week Bookshop

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez, 1985

This story of an epic love unrequited for 50 years, nine months, and four days is written with Gabriel García Márquez's hallmark humour and wisdom. It confronts the realities of aging and consoles us with the revelation that if we can only keep believing, then the miracle of love is still possible.

Available on The Week Bookshop

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens, 1861

The book that made me want to be a novelist. Reading it in a classroom at age 14, it entered me like no book before or since. Dickens's world was more real than the Dublin outside. When Pip fell in love with Estella, so did I; when his heart was broken, mine was too.

Available on The Week Bookshop

Housekeeping

Marilynne Robinson, 1980

This hauntingly beautiful novel is a flawless thing. It tells the story of Ruth and her younger sister Lucille's haphazard upbringing under the care of their eccentric aunt Sylvie in Fingerbone. The narration is hued with melancholy, the sentences hypnotic, and the whole book made with a grace not often found in fiction.

Available on The Week Bookshop

The World-Ending Fire

Wendell Berry, 2017

A collection of essays, written with Wendell Berry's signature grace and gravitas, each one stakes out its ground with authority, and the wisdom that comes from paying close attention to the land. After reading one of these essays, you pause, lift your head, and go outside.

Available on The Week Bookshop