Tash Aw picks his favourite books

The Malaysian writer chooses his five favourite books. His debut, "The Harmony Silk Factory", won the Whitbread First Novel Award. His new novel, "The South", is out this week.

Giovanni's Room

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. To my mind, it's also the ultimate Paris novel.

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Uncle Vanya

Anton Chekhov, 1898

Of all of Chekhov's plays, this is perhaps the one that has stayed with me the longest because it reminded me so much of my own family, despite our circumstances being so different – a family of two halves, of town and country, education and peasantry; the most affecting story of thwarted ambition and longing.

The Lover

Marguerite Duras, 1984

Duras's heavily autobiographical novel has long been the subject of furious polemic – it tells of an affair between a 15-year-old French schoolgirl and a wealthy Chinese man twice her age in colonial Vietnam. An intense, evocative and unsettling reading experience, and a masterclass in how to enmesh memoir and fiction.

Beloved

Toni Morrison, 1987

The angriest, most haunting novel about racism, exclusion and the sacrifices one makes for love and family. This was one of the novels that made me question why I wrote, and to think about what a novel was capable of achieving – how it could be both haunting and political.

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst, 2004

I knew it was an instant classic the moment I read it – the story of a man navigating class, sexuality and capitalism in the cruel, heady days of Thatcher's Britain. One of the most important English novels of all time.