Paul Whitehead recommends

There are so many great books which I’ve loved, it was incredibly difficult to pick just six. I’ve had to leave out some of my favourite classics, including Pride & Prejudice, but then it doesn’t really need me to recommend books like that! In some ways harder to omit are more recent books I’ve really enjoyed – the pick being Claire North’s Touch and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. The selection I have chosen though I found impossible to leave out!

Gulliver’s Travels

Jonathan Swift

To be honest, I was torn between including this and Alice Through The Looking Glass (my favourite “children’s” book), but I went for Gulliver’s Travels, because over the years I keep coming back to it – the sheer inventiveness still feels fresh and relevant – and it was written in 1726!

Any Human Heart

William Boyd

My favourite author has written so many fantastic books – other favourites of mine are The Blue Afternoon and An Ice Cream War – but this one, diarising the life of a fictitious individual through the 20th Century, is moving and emotional, funny and sad, entertaining and educating. A wonderful book!

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

A quite magical book. Original and tremendously imaginative, I was totally captivated from cover to cover.

Bleak House

Charles Dickens

I could have chosen several Dickens, but this is just about my favourite. Although a rather daunting thousand pages (give or take a few), it is full of wonderful characters, twists, and one of the most famous (or infamous) legal cases in fiction. The BBC television adaption is also worth watching – it was quite brilliant.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Of the several South American writers I love (with Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa), this book stands out as an epic family saga, with a bit of magical realism thrown in.

Shantaram

Gregory David Roberts

I believe I was “late to the party” with this one, but it is the most amazing and gripping story (based, loosely, on the author’s own experience) of a bank robber who escapes from jail to live in the slums of Mumbai and then joins the local mafia.