In the last of Jilly Cooper’s Rutshire Chronicles – her epic, engrossing sagas of bucolic life among horse-riding poshos – Rupert Campbell-Black, template-handsome cad turned loving husband, is now (I did the... Read more »
7 The Professor (written 1846; published 1857) by Charlotte Brontë This was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. It was rejected by publishers nine times. Written in the voice of a... Read more »
10 My Lover’s Lover (2002) The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she’s actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the... Read more »
10 Duffy (1980) Duffy is the first in a series of crime novels about a bisexual private eye that Barnes published under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. It came out the same year... Read more »
Inspired by and drawing on three British novels (HG Wells’s The Time Machine, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Henry Green’s Concluding), Updike’s debut imagines a near future where the residents of a... Read more »
“It makes me want to hide behind the furniture,” Rushdie now says of his debut. It’s a science fiction story, more or less, but also indicative of the sort of writer Rushdie would become:... Read more »
How do you follow a smash hit like White Teeth, which, as everyone now knows, sold for a six-figure sum while the author was still at university, and turned Zadie Smith into... Read more »
This dispatch from what we might call the extended Colm Tóibín universe is set near the same time and in the same place as his earlier novel Brooklyn (one character appears in... Read more »
After more than 30 years, Atwood caved to pleas to write a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not since Harry Potter had a publication caused such a sensation: computers were hacked in... Read more »