Antoine Laurain is one of my favourite writers. I pick up every one of his books expecting to love it, and he almost never disappoints. French Windows has all the elements that I associate with his writing. It's charming, quirky, and interesting. But this book has the added element of murder and mystery. You never quite know where it is going...

This is a novel about siblings, Peter, 32 and Ivan, a decade younger. When the story begins, the boys have just lost their father. Peter is in charge of the service, and he can’t help being embarrassed by his kid brother Ivan - chess whiz, socially awkward, in his ugly rented suit, looking utterly lost...

Natalia Ginzburg has a way of getting into the heart of everyday life, its small rewards and stubborn obstacles. Her prose is plain and spare. In both novellas, the narrator uses a flat register - either resigned to their circumstances or detached enough to tell the tale from a remove. Any emotion you feel is therefore your own as you read.

James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979) is best known for three thematically linked novels: Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur, and The Singapore Grip, collectively known as the Empire Trilogy. The Siege of Krishnapur, published in 1973, won that year's Booker Prize and was later shortlisted for the Best of the Booker in 2008...

Alice Winn's debut novel, In Memoriam, was published in 2023. This was one of my favourite reads that year and it's become a permanent fixture on my bookshelf. I’ve just been re-reading it and I love it as much as I did the first time...

The Persian Boy is a work of historical fiction by Mary Renault, published in 1972. It's the second book in her trilogy about Alexander the Great, following Fire from Heaven and preceding Funeral Games. However, it works perfectly well as a standalone novel...

This novel, set in contemporary Palestine, centers on Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress who returns to Palestine after a long absence to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa and teaches at a university in Tel Aviv. While Haneen and Sonia are not estranged per se, there is a distance there, to be bridged. Haneen introduces Sonia to a close friend of hers, Mariam, a theatre director who is putting together a production of "Hamlet" in the West Bank. It is art but it is also an act of resistance...

This is a charming book. It’s warm and funny and gently satirical. It has a fairly unusual plot, and it's very entertaining. It's an easy read in the sense that the narrative carries you along, and it's so absorbing that it's hard to put the book down. This book is set in the 1930's, in a small English village called Silverstream...

Italo Calvino is a writer who constantly reinvented himself, moving from gritty realism to whimsical folk tales to some of the best non-linear experimental fiction of the 20th Century.His early work was realistic and reflective of the political climate of the day, but he gradually began to drift away from realism. Calvino spent years collecting and translating hundreds of traditional Italian folk tales. It's perhaps because of this that a lot of his stories read like modern myths...

Barbara Pym is one my favourite writers, someone who deserves to be better known than she is. She was born in Shropshire in 1913. Her father was a solicitor, and her mother was an organist in their local church. Her mother’s involvement in the parish and what it did to their social life had a clear impact on Pym’s novels which are full of entertaining vicars and curates...

This is a poignant, and often humorous, story of the Mendes family in Bombay, about living with a family member struggling with mental illness and the profound impact this has on all their lives. The story is narrated by the unnamed son, who is trying to come to terms with his mother Imelda’s (Em) recurring battles with bipolar disorder, while his father, Augustine (‘The Big Hoom’) serves as the family’s stoic anchor amidst the chaos, of which there is plenty...

The novel is set in Vienna in the 1960’s, in a café that becomes the gathering place for a varied and initially unconnected group of people, who eventually grow into a community. The story begins when Robert Simon, a young man, who spent years working in the market stalls takes a leap of faith to open his own cafe...