The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard, 1990-2013 (Pan Macmillan £9.99 each). A panoramic unpicking of the intimate lives of generations of one family, Howard’s intricate, painful, expansive sequence of five novels is usually, stupidly, dismissed as “domestic”, a “historical saga” about the middle class. Fools; it’s a masterpiece. If the author were male, we’d all take it seriously.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, 1956 (Penguin £7.99). Baldwin, a gay black American, knew Otherness; his writing about race is electrifying, but this short, harrowing novel about an Italian waiter in Paris is unparalleled for its understanding of fear, poverty, passion and the end of love.
Milkman by Anna Burns, 2018 (Faber £8.99). Burns won the Booker for this dazzlingly bold, utterly true study of domestic terrorism, oppression, gossip, religion, sexuality…
