The books that marked me, and the ones I press on friends.
Thirteen, because ten would have meant leaving out Borges. Most of these I first read in French, as a boy, in no particular order and with no one telling me which were serious.
Ignatius J. Reilly is a disaster in a hunting cap, and still the best proof I know that a whole novel can run on pure, unrepentant self-regard.
The great revenge novel, and a patient one. Dantès spends fourteen years in a cell learning that the long game is the only one worth playing.
A diary kept by a man who suspects something is drinking the water beside his bed at night. A mind coming loose, one dated entry at a time.
Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect, and his first worry is that he will be late for work. Everything I believe about deadpan started here.
The Devil visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes a large cat fond of vodka and chess. The bureaucrats are mostly concerned with the paperwork.
A young officer waits at a frontier fort for an enemy who never arrives, and his life goes by in the waiting. The saddest novel I know about ambition.
Murder in a medieval abbey, solved by a Franciscan with a magnifying lens and a weakness for forbidden books. The library is the real suspect.
Three detective stories in which the detective slowly becomes the case. Auster taught me that a self is something you can misplace.
Benacquista writes crime novels about the people at the edges of things, here a man who hangs paintings in a Paris gallery. Quick, funny, and sadder than it lets on.
A French police commissaire narrates his own adventures in a slang so inventive that Dard had to build most of it himself. Close to untranslatable; nearly two hundred books of it.
On an ocean liner, a world champion meets a man who learned chess from a stolen book in solitary confinement. Under a hundred pages, and it plays like a thriller.
Druon's cycle on the fourteenth-century French crown: poison, curses, and a court that makes any modern cabinet look gentle. George R.R. Martin has called it the original game of thrones.
Late Borges. The title story is about a book with no first page and no last, which its owner comes to fear more than anything he possesses. Every story in it is a trapdoor.
Thrillers where the sentences matter as much as the plot, and where the most dangerous object in the room is usually a file.
George Smiley, retired and underestimated, hunts a Soviet mole at the top of the Circus. The benchmark for everything that followed.
Disgraced spies are exiled to a building of failure, run by the most repellent man in British fiction. Funny, and then suddenly not.
A daughter learns that her mild English mother was once a Russian émigré recruited by British intelligence. The past arrives like a live wire.
A quiet man in a dull section of MI6, a leak, and a service willing to kill to tidy up. Greene at his most restrained.
A nameless, insubordinate narrator, a missing scientist, and a Cold War London that runs on paperwork and resentment.
A crime novelist in Istanbul sets out to trace the life of a dead criminal. Written on the eve of the war, and the modern spy novel more or less starts here.
The incoming chief of MI6 disappears days before she takes the job, and a disgraced officer is quietly brought back to find her.
A drought-struck Riverina town, a priest who shot five of his parishioners, and a journalist sent to write the anniversary piece.
A federal agent returns to his parched hometown for a friend's funeral and finds that the town has already decided what happened.
Quiller works alone in Berlin against a neo-Nazi network, and the whole book is written from inside his nerves.
Suspense built from the inside: an unreliable mind, a small wrong detail, a decision that cannot be taken back.
Tom Ripley wants another man's life, and takes it. Highsmith makes you hope he gets away with it, which is the real crime.
A woman travels to Greece to look for the husband she has already left. Cool, exact, and quietly unnerving.
A second wife, a great house, and a first wife everyone still talks about. The dread is in the furniture.
A respectable Dutch clerk learns his employer is a fraud and simply steps out of his own life. Simenon follows him all the way down.
We learn on the first page that they killed Bunny. The rest is how clever people talk themselves into anything.
The first line tells you who killed the Coverdale family, and why. It is still impossible to put down.
A woman flies south looking for the right man to meet her fate. Barely a hundred pages, and colder than anything else on this list.
A Dublin detective investigates a child's murder in the same wood where his own childhood friends vanished.
A history teacher spots his exact double in a rented film, and cannot leave it alone.
A lonely clerk wins the pools and spends the money keeping a young woman captive. Told twice: once by him, once by her.
Books you can finish in an evening, or on a long flight, and go on thinking about well after you land.
A coal merchant in 1980s Ireland makes a delivery to the convent before Christmas and sees what he was not meant to.
Meursault's mother dies, and he fails to perform the correct grief. The trial that follows is really about that.
A marriage told in fragments, jokes and borrowed facts, with the white space doing much of the work.
A young Belgian woman joins a Tokyo corporation and is demoted, with great ceremony, all the way to the toilets.
One man's life in the American West, from railway labourer to hermit, in about a hundred pages.
A retired man is left a small bequest and a diary he is not allowed to read, and his memory begins to fail its own audit.
A father and two boys, newly bereaved, and the crow who moves in to help. Part novel, part poem.
A wedding night in 1962, and the single hour that decides two lives.
Keiko has worked at the same convenience store for eighteen years and is happier there than anywhere. Everyone else considers this a problem.
The whole town knows Santiago Nasar is going to be killed. Nobody quite manages to warn him.
Novels of restraint, where most of what matters happens under the surface and the prose trusts you to go down and find it.
Kathy remembers her school, her friends, and what they were for, in a voice so calm it is nearly unbearable.
A man lives alone in an endless house of statues and tides, and keeps a very careful journal.
A runaway boy, an old man who talks to cats, and a private library in a quiet coastal town.
A man who arrived in Wales as a child refugee slowly recovers the past he was sent away from.
A writer teaching a summer course in Athens listens to the people she meets. Her own story arrives in the gaps.
A girl is sent to relatives for a summer and learns, for the first time, what being cared for feels like.
Oxford in the 1830s, and an institute of translators whose silver runs on what is lost between languages.
A university librarian answers letters for a doom podcast, and the end of the world arrives as a series of small anxieties.
A filmmaker arrives on the plains of inland Australia to make a film about them, and never quite begins.
A farm boy becomes a professor of English and lives an ordinary life, which turns out to be everything.
Comic fiction with a serious engine: the joke is funny first, and true about a page later.
A writer researching the day the bomb fell stumbles onto ice-nine, an invented religion, and the end of everything.
Stories of drug trials, human lawn ornaments and a boy in a frozen wood, each one funny right up to the point where it isn't.
The gospel according to Biff, Christ's childhood pal. Irreverent, and more tender than it has any right to be.
An angel and a demon, fond of each other and of Earth, try to stop the Apocalypse because they have grown used to lunch.
The only way out of the war is to be crazy, and asking to be let out proves you are sane.
A nature columnist is sent to cover a war by mistake, and becomes the paper's star correspondent.
Earth is demolished to make way for a bypass, and the last man alive is still in his dressing gown.
A near-future New York where everyone's credit rating is broadcast in the street, and love has to compete with the feed.
A young woman joins the world's most powerful tech company and helps it turn privacy into a kind of theft.
A struggling novelist steals her dead friend's manuscript and publishes it as her own. The industry does the rest.