"To Kill a Mockingbird is way up there, but that’s also like an On the Waterfront kind of classic movie, also with a personal journey set against a bigger social issue — racism — but I’m going to go instead with Ordinary People, directed by Robert Redford with Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton who won an Oscar — one of the youngest Oscar winners I think — Donald Sutherland, and Judd Hirsch playing the psychiatrist."

"The rarest of books about the experience of a science writer uncovering and investigating a cell line that changed the world, all while being thrown into a transformative journey of discovering race and racism in America, the culture of African Americans in the USA, and the painful reality of loss and family. A truly remarkable read—and I failed at science. Fascinating and phenomenal, heartbreaking and utterly compelling."

"This is a kind of Alice In Wonderland premise: A man is looking for a cat. Murakami describes these banal domestic experiences, but, cumulatively, he spins an outrageous, trippy story. That's a kind of magic — to make the magical seem ordinary and vice versa. It's such a tender story, his search for the cat and, by extension, a life. That one task leads him on a labyrinthine journey."

"The first novel I read that held together on a regular plane as well as thematic one - as story as well as a symbolic journey. There could be others that work like Jude, but something about this book - the way the author is dealing with ideas like evolution along with the collapse of class culture - made it feel like a precursor to modernism. Like the birth of modernism."

"The existential side of inner seeking, which appealed to another part of me as an adolescent. The war-traumatized pilot Larry Darrell was my first encounter with a character who walks away from conventional social life to find inner meaning. I suppose you could say that Maugham waves a sparkler at the start of the spiritual journey. Materialism and money-grubbing get a bashing, which is worth thinking about today."