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Malaysian novelist Tash Aw is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory and Five Star Billionaire, both long-listed for the Booker Prize. His new book, The South, begins a quartet of novels and portrays a summerlong romance between two teenage Malaysian boys.
'Giovanni's Room' by James Baldwin (1956)
I first read this when I was at university and return to it regularly. It's the story of young people falling in love and trying to carve out a space for themselves in a foreign city—which sounds simple enough. But there's so much packed into such a slim volume: discrimination, exclusion, desire, the denial of the self. It's the ultimate Paris novel. Buy it here.
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'Beloved' by Toni Morrison (1987)
This has to be the angriest, most haunting novel about racism, exclusion, and the sacrifices one makes for love and family. It is also one of the novels that made me question why I write, and think about what a novel was capable of achieving—how it could be both haunting and political. Buy it here.
'The Lover' by Marguerite Duras (1984)
Duras' heavily autobiographical novel has long been the subject of furious polemic. It tells of an affair in colonial Vietnam between a 15-year-old French schoolgirl and a wealthy Chinese man twice her age. It is an intense, evocative, and unsettling reading experience, and a master class in how to enmesh memoir and fiction. Buy it here.
'Uncle Vanya' by Anton Chekhov (1897)
Of all of Chekhov's plays, this is the one that has stayed with me the longest, perhaps because it reminds me so much of my own family: a family of two halves, of town and country, education and peasantry. It's the most affecting story of thwarted ambition and longing. Buy it here.
'The Line of Beauty' by Alan Hollinghurst (2004)
I knew this would be an instant classic the moment I read it. It tells of a man navigating class, sexuality, and capitalism in the cruel, heady days of Margaret Thatcher's Britain. One of the most important English novels of all time. Buy it here.
'The Buru Quartet' by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1980–88)
It's impossible to read these four novels as anything but a single monumental work. Pramoedya wrote them throughout his internment as a political prisoner in the 1960s and '70s, during which he was deprived of all writing materials and so related the text orally to fellow prisoners. Together, the novels form a portrait of Indonesia's resistance to Dutch colonial rule and the search for national and personal freedom. Buy it here.
