"Imagine being an 18-year-old girl, on holiday with two radical poets, and coming up with an idea for a Gothic horror novel which also more or less invents the genre of science fiction, which then goes on to become such a huge and enduring success, constantly open to reinterpretation and reimagining, that it still seems vivid and alive two hundred years later."

"One of the most prolific writers in history, Simenon is best known for his crime novels featuring the detective Maigret. “I’ll manufacture Fords for a while until enough money comes in,” he said once, “Then I’ll make Rolls-Royces for pleasure.” Dirty Snow is a Rolls. A slender novel about a petty criminal living in a nameless occupied city, this book punches well above its weight class."

"This epic saga sweeping through four generations of life among Kenya’s Kikuyu tribe is a novel of Steinbeckian stature neglected by literary connoisseurs. Huxley leads us into the Kikuyu world so that, when the British arrive, they seem as alien as invading Martians. Her descriptive powers rival Steinbeck’s, but her imagery is drawn from the Kikuyu mind. A felled tree ‘tottered like a drunken elder.'

"Another melodrama, of a completely different genre. An airport novel plot and a mise en scène in which the bitterness transcends the twisted connections between a young innocent girl, her seductress mother and the men. All is blood and cruelty, absolute misery and decadent eroticism. The kind of meeting between outsider art, Fassbinder and Z movie that makes you want to dive into Brocka’s insane filmography."

"This has been on my list forever, but it’s been getting a lot of attention lately because of Todd Haynes’ excellent movie adaptation, “Carol.” It was the first novel about lesbians to have a happy ending, but it’s also a really unnerving and propulsive story, like all of Patricia Highsmith’s books. She originally published it under a pseudonym so it didn’t wreck her career."