W&N Essentials

Recommended by David
‘The strange and wonderful landscapes of northern England are stripped of their beauty and imbued with new grandeur in M. John Harrison’s strange and wonderful study of obsession.’

Recommended by Gayle
‘Jane Bowles’s only novel is an under-read modernist classic that follows the two serious ladies of the title as they each strike out on their own unexpected paths: ‘I have gone to pieces, which is a thing I've wanted to do for years,’ declares one. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that feels so genuinely like a dream – unsettling, out of time, with a logic all of its own, that lingers in the mind long after it’s done.’

Recommended by John
‘J.G. Farrell’s masterpiece, the second in his loose trilogy about the decline of the British Empire, tells the story of the British community of the small town of Krishnapur under siege in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and their eventual collapse and retreat. Harrowing in places, it is also extremely funny, and nobody who has encountered his cast of brilliantly-drawn characters is likely to forget them.’

Recommended by Gayle
‘A totally joyful experience from start to finish, and full of delicious food to boot (Laurie Colwin was also a food writer) – like a gentler, happier companion to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn. I defy you not to fall in love with each and every character in this book.’

Recommended by Rachael
‘O Caledonia!’s Janet is a classic comic heroine, in that she is also a classic tragic heroine: lonely, unloved, overlooked, and yet somehow staunchly herself throughout. And who that self is is truly splendid: imaginative, spiky, bookish, fiercely intelligent, and completely socially unaware. Her family despise her – her mother Vera finds even the sight of Janet reading ‘peculiarly irritating’. Her schoolmates make use of her intelligence to cheat on their homework and laugh at her ‘exaggerated stories of her incompetence in every aspect of the day's routine, and the dire consequences it provoked’, while also preferring to avoid spending any actual time with her. We know from the start how Janet will end the novel – dead in her mother’s black lace evening dress, twisted on the stone staircase in the dilapidated castle in which her family live and run a boarding school – and by the end we’ll know how and why she got there, but all the real fun is in the journey the novel takes us on through 'l’étouffoir familial', the family suffocation chamber (Proust by way of Janet).’

Recommended by David
‘In Nabokov’s “most perfect novel”, the action takes place between a poem and its commentary. An unforgettable masterpiece.’

Recommended by Gayle
‘One of the most perfect short novels I’ve ever read. Helen Garner vividly depicts the gentle implosion of the Fox family – from shabby domestic bliss to disaster (and back again) – in 150 pages of brilliantly spare prose.’

Recommended by Natalia
‘Surprisingly sarcastic and moving story revolving around 21 characters, whose thoughts and lives span from the historical moments of their lives and the moral decisions they make – from pre-occupied Poland to the tragedy of the Nazi invasion in Warsaw to the convulsion of Europe in the post-war years – the reader will know throughout who survives or who perishes, questioning their moral or immoral conscious about the roles they have played.

At the centre of it all is the planned rescue of Mrs Seidenman, who during the war has survived by passing as the widow of a Polish Officer but is arrested after a Polish informant hands her over to the police.’