Books that Inspire Me

What follows is a fairly random list of favourite books by authors whom I admire.  You never know, you might like some of them too.

Life a User’s Manual by Georges Perec

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

All About H Hatterr by G V Desani

The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter

The Inheritors by William Golding

Austerlitz by W G Sebald

Alva and Irva by Edward Carey

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy

New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

The Aerodrome by Rex Warner

Broken April by Ismail Kadare

Sculptor’s Daughter by Tove Jansson

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills

A Family and a Fortune by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

Little Hands Clapping by Dan Rhodes

Love and Garbage by Ivan Klíma

Hav by Jan Morris

So, there you are – that gives you an idea of the sort of books I read and what influences me in my writing…

 

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