Nineteenth century

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion

Charlotte Bronte: Villette

Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son and A Tale of Two Cities

George Eliot: Silas Marner and Adam Bede

Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Balzac: Lost Illusions

Tolstoy: War and Peace

Flaubert: Madame Bovary

Stendhal: Scarlet and Black

Emile Zola La Bete Humaine

Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and The Idiot

Later English books:

D.H.Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, and the poem called Snake

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway and A Room of One’s Own

Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca

David Lodge: A Small World

Barbara Trapido: Brother of the More Famous Jack

A.S.Byatt: Possession

Jeannette Winterson: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

… and whatever I have read and enjoyed most recently, a huge list that I cannot control, so I won’t try, but last week (Feb. 2005) I did adore Ian McEwen’s Saturday and am currently swooning over Surrender by Sonia Hartnett.

Australian books:

Leslie Rees: Shy the Platypus

Dorothy Wall: The Adventures of Blinky Bill

May Gibbs: Snuggle Pot and Cuddle Pie

Henry Lawson: While the Billy Boils

Helen Garner: The First Stone

Peter Carey: Jack Maggs

Patrick White: The Solid Mandala

Sally Morgan: My Place

Shirley Hazzard: The Transit of Venus

Tom Keneally: Schindler’s Ark

Tim Winton: Cloudstreet , The Riders and Turning Point

North American books:

Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

Alice Walker: The Color Purple

William Faulkner: Light in August

Canadian books:

Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry: Such a Long Journey

E. Annie Proulx: Shipping News

Indian Books:

Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy

R.K. Narayan: The English Teacher and The Tiger of Malgudi

South American Books:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Mario Varghas Llosa: Aunt Julia and the Script-Writer

Isabelle Allende: Eva Luna

Others:

The Bible

Shakespeare

Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury

Jung Chang: Wild Swans

Naguib Mahfouz: Wedding Song

Katherine Mansfield: Bliss