Mrs. Dalloway: a classic and a masterpiece. It’s a love story.
The baron in the trees: weird and allegorical. A boy goes up into the trees and never comes down.
Memoirs of Hadrian: the only historical fiction I’ve ever loved. Published by a French woman in the 50s after a decades long obsession with the project.
The last samurai: by Helen Dewitt unrelated to the Tom Cruise movie of the same name. A totally original story about the life of the mind.
Family lexicon: a spare memoir/novel about growing up in an anti-fascist family during the rise of Mussolini.
Remains of the day: how does Kazuo Ishiguro do it? He also wrote Klara and the sun rec’d above. Ending is wow.
More: East of Eden, Middlemarch, The things they carried, Close to the knives, Giovanni’s room, Just kids, The Road, The myth of Sisyphus
