A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara: The best novel that I’ve read in years. Many novels have made me cry, but this one made me scream. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read anything so affecting. (Her first novel is also superb too)
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell: He did that most rare thing with this and with Cloud Atlas; he pushed the novel ahead by a decade. Masterful, versatile, controlled, adventurous and brilliant as well.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami: He’s a phenomenon now, but when I first read him he was little known outside of Japan. It’s very hard to classify or explain this novel. It seems to fold your mind in on itself. It is an easy novel to enter and never come out of.
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende: Most people prefer Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude (the two books have several similarities), but I like this one for its heart. I think Fay Weldon called it the perfect novel. I remember thinking something similar after I’d finished.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: This achieves a similar effect to The Remains of the Day with its ability to compress macroscopic world events into into a microscopic canvas. The final paragraph is one of the most devastating that I’ve ever read. The writer was only 28 when it was published, which feels impossible, but it’s true.
The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi: The first novel I ever related to. It’s so full of energy, vitality, humour, hope and youth; a template for all coming-of-age novels. It’s the one I go to when I feel sad or lost, and is surely the novel I’ve read the most times. If I have to pick a favourite out of all of them, this would be it.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro: Another novel that invites the use of the word ‘perfect’. The way it balances the interior and the exterior, the domestic and the social, the emotional and the historical, is so deftly executed and so elegant. I’m glad he won the Nobel Prize.
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison: The opening is unforgettable, those chilling first lines followed by the boxing match. It’s as if there’s a direct line between Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground), Sartre (Nausea) and then Ellison, who influenced so many writers of colour. Recently I read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathiser and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, and wasn’t at all surprised when both cited Ellison as an influence.
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges: It was an impossible choice between this and Kafka’s stories as I love both of them. Borges’s ideas are ingenious and his execution so sharp. He makes one wonder if the rest of us who write novels are merely suffering from the curse of sloppiness. There’s so much in each story and they seem to lodge in the mind forever once read. (The same, of course, applies to Kafka).
House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera: I read this aged 18 in Zimbabwe, staying up half the night to do so. Wandering around Harare the next day, I met at least five people who used to know him. The craziest, wildest, most self-destructive of them all, he was once described as a ‘language terrorist’. He died young, of course. It’s dizzying to think of what he might done had he lived another 30 years.
I have just finished the House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara which, if I make such a list again in five years-time, could be on it. I found myself dreaming about the characters for much of the night in a heartbroken trance. Impossibly beautiful.
- Dr Rajeev Balasubramanyam is a novelist whose awards include the Betty Trask Prize and the Clarissa Luard Prize for the best British writer under 35. His newest novel, Professor Chandra Follows His Bliss, will be published by Chatto & Windus/Vintage (UK) and Random House (USA) in January 2019. He lives in Berlin. Visit Twitter: @Rajeevbalas and www.rajeevbalasubramanyam.com for more
