Medieval Thrilller with political connotations and more history than you can shake a stick at. Once you've read it send it to your dad

'Kafka gives us the food we need'. Strangely perceptive and hauntingly human scenes of terribly lucid and horrific imagination. A genius without question who saw in things more than we could know.

Ambiguous, moving and perceptive. A tragic farce with outstanding war reflections and marvelous story telling. Stalin called writers 'The engineer of human souls', Skvorecky took him to task.

Any Nabokov really, but this is the best. Though almost impenetrable at first reading, there is enough here for a lifetime; beautiful, perverse and stunningly profound.

A great story, well told and poignant. Spanish civil war, some history, but mainly a tale of hearts and minds in crisis and fervour.

I read this ages ago and books have been more vibrant, refreshing and more intelligent since; now I know how exhilarating and surprising literature can be if you become absorbed into it.

The contemporary writer I've read the most. I find him comforting and strangely brilliant though I couldn't say why. There is an unsettling, stark beauty to his books. This is, I think, his best.

Simple, elegant and bleak. Makes you wonder why you can't write like that. Then you try. A book for all times, to take with you and remind yourself of.

Tolstoy never met Dostoevsky but had a great respect for him. His works are very much of his time but exude class & style. His prose is elegant and his stories humane. Lose yourself in another time.

Disquiet indeed. Thoughful and profound observations, philosophies, aphorisms. Sureal and brilliant, artful and meandering. This is a modern existential bible.

I'm not sure how well read Golding is anymore but he's great, his style is evasive and subtle his characters crazed and the stories allegorical and sharp. The spire is a unforgetable.