Lionel Shriver's Reading List

"I raced through Amor Towles's Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow back to back. The prose style in both is a delight: elegant, clean, crisp and dry, like a good Italian white."

"I raced through Amor Towles's Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow back to back. The prose style in both is a delight: elegant, clean, crisp and dry, like a good Italian white."

"Bowled over by Maria McCann's 2001 historical novel As Meat Loves Salt, I made its promotion something of a personal cause celebre."

"I fiercely touted the masterly clash-of-civilizations novel The Forgiven in 2012, when its author, Lawrence Osborne, was underacknowledged."

"Of the Roth novels that take on the indignities of aging, my favorite is the slender Everyman, which punches above its page length."

"The Australian Helen Garner wrote about the frustrations of living with the terminally ill in The Spare Room, about a friend with cancer who moves in with the protagonist."

"Margaret Forster's eloquent and sometimes comedic Have the Men Had Enough? is about a live-in grandmother's deteriorating dementia."

"One of those rare perfect gems of a book, it's funny as well as heartbreaking."

"T. C. Boyle took on both sides of the immigration issue in The Tortilla Curtain."

"Of Dostoevsky’s novels, most writers would cite The Brothers Karamazov — I adored it in adolescence, but could not bear rereading it in my thirties. I hadn’t the patience. But rereading The Idiot — the tale of the holy fool Prince Myshkin — as an adult rewarded the return. I was then writing my second novel and grappling with how difficult it is to write about goodness. Virtue in literature, as it is often in real people, can be downright off-putting. The secret, I discovered, was to put virt..."

"Edith Wharton’s prose style is lucid, intelligent and artful rather than arty; she’s eloquent but never fussy, and always clear. A friend of Henry James, Wharton never seems to be writing well to show off. This poignant story, set in upper-class New York in the 1870s, illustrates the bind for women — the choice is a demeaning if relaxing servitude and a dignified if frightening independence. Should one follow desire or the demands of morality? The novel is romantic and frankly heartbreaking,..."

"Although I’ve never met a Richard Yates book I didn’t like, Revolutionary Road is my favorite, and it’s certainly his most celebrated. In 1955 Frank and April Wheeler have moved from bohemian Greenwich Village to suburban Connecticut. But the couple feel superior to their dumpy, culturally arid neighbors in Revolutionary Hill Estates and they plan to move to sophisticated Paris. Yates’s skewering of middle-class pretension and typically American anti-Americanism starts out gentle, but the sto..."