"I had a similar experience with the Garcia Marquez novel A Hundred Years of Solitude. In miraculous Macondo, the ordinary and supernatural are entwined; incest and intermarriage give many generations of the Buendia family a classically Greek and predestined future."

"Lanark is widely and justifiably regarded as Gray’s masterpiece. But I love this novel and its protagonist; masturbating, alcoholic, conservative Jock. It shows the dismal outcome of a life that succumbs to fear, but is still somehow an uplifting book."

"This unjustly forgotten 1980 novel is unlike anything else: Its portrait of a world after a nuclear holocaust — the explosion of the “1 Big 1″ — is written in language that’s brilliantly fractured, as if a bomb has exploded there as well."

"Great Australian author Stead wrote this brilliant novel about the Pollits family, and set it in the USA at the behest of her agent. Jonathon Franzen said it best when he said it “makes Revolutionary Road look like Everybody Loves Raymond. "

"I’m not that keen on contrafactual books. Erpenbeck’s novel is something different, though. By letting people die and then come to life again in the next chapter, she tells an epic family story covering an essential part of Europe’s 20th century."

"The novel that I reread the most. Melinda and I love one line so much that we had it painted on a wall in our house: “His dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it.”

"Maybe the greatest novel ever written, but I haven’t read them all! It’s all of humankind head-on by Dostoevsky. A mix of sadism and humor. In Poland I shot a movie by Andrzej Wajda based on this great book."