• The Best Counterfactual Novels - Loop by Brenda Lozano, translated by Annie McDermott
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Elizabeth Costello by J M Coetzee
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Screen Tests by Kate Zambreno
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - Never Any End to Paris by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean
  • The Best Counterfactual Novels - These Possible Lives by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Minna Proctor

The Best Counterfactual Novels, recommended by Catherine Lacey

Novelists often make the decision to create alternate realities—worlds that are very like, but not quite identical, to our our own. Catherine Lacey, the acclaimed novelist whose latest book Biography of X is set in a United States in which the Southern states seceded during the 20th century, talks us through the process of plotting counterfactual timelines and recommends five books that explore the slippery relation between truth, reality, and fiction.

  • The Best William Golding Books - The Inheritors by William Golding, with a foreword by Ben Okri
  • The Best William Golding Books - The Spire by William Golding, with a foreword by Benjamin Myers
  • The Best William Golding Books - Darkness Visible by William Golding, with a foreword by Nicola Barker
  • The Best William Golding Books - Rites of Passage by William Golding, with a foreword by Annie Proulx
  • The Best William Golding Books - Lord of the Flies by William Golding, with a foreword by Stephen King

The Best William Golding Books, recommended by Judy Golding

The Nobel laureate William Golding is best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, in which a group of schoolboys marooned on a desert island revert to savagery. But he was a prolific writer who produced eleven further novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage. Here, his daughter and manager of his literary estate Judy Golding selects five of William Golding’s key texts, including The Inheritors—the book he felt to be his best work.

  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - The Heart of Mid-Lothian by Walter Scott
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - Gillespie by John MacDougall Hay
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - The Grampian Quartet by Nan Shepherd
  • Landmarks of Scottish Literature - Silence by James Kennaway

Landmarks of Scottish Literature, recommended by James Robertson

Scottish culture is best understood as related to, but distinct from, that of Britain or England, says the acclaimed novelist James Robertson. Here, he selects five landmark works of Scottish literature, from Sir Walter Scott’s sweeping, panoramic social novels of the 18th century, through Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, to Nan Shepherd’s beloved nature writing.

  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Solaris by Stanisław Lem
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Lady Into Fox by David Garnett
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - The Dry Heart by Natalia Ginzburg
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
  • Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books - Journey in Search of the Way by Myōdō Satomi

Forgotten Classics: The Best B-Side Books, recommended by John Plotz

New books are constantly being published. Sometimes they slip by unremarked; sometimes their impact is so enormous as to divert the flow of literature altogether. But what of those books that made a splash on arrival, but have long since disappeared from view? John Plotz, the literary scholar, has spent five years resurfacing these forgotten classics: the ‘B-side books’ that have fallen from the public consciousness.