1 Destiny

Tim Parks (1999)

This, for my money, is the best British novel of the last 40 years. Certainly it’s the one which makes me envious. A short novel which maps out the collapse of a marriage, it is a marvel of both technique and compassion. I know of no other novel which brings the reader so close to the rhythms and pressures and tensions of a lived life.

2 Days Of Abandonment

Elena Ferrante (2005)

This is a novel to read in one sitting. Another collapsed marriage and one woman’s ferocious rage. Extraordinary emotional intensity.

3 Neuromancer

William Gibson (1984)

Brilliant and baffling and liberating. It opened up a whole new world for me when I read it first.

4 Riddley Walker

Russel Hoban (1980)

This is the best post-apocalypse novel bar none. Riddley, tramping his sodden way across our imaginations, rhyming his rhymes and humping his load, is an unforgettable character.

5 Cosmopolis

Don De Lillo (2003)

This is the short masterpiece of De Lillo’s late period. A hedge fund manager takes a trip across mid-day Manhattan. In the process he gets fucked in all sorts of ways – financially, physically, psychically. The novel is also poetic, in the best sense of the word.

6 Ploughing The Dark

Richard Powers (2000)

I could have chosen three or four books by this brilliant writer, but I will go for this one simply because the end, the closing paragraph, fell on me like a hammer.

7 The Death Of Sweet Mister

Daniel Woodrell (2001)

All I can say is that this crime novel broke my heart like no other. Still haunted by it.

8 Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy (1985)

The Judge, the Comanches, the mules toppling down the ravine with the canisters of mercury, the prose, the landscape… it turned the heads of a generation of young men.

9 Age Of Iron

John Coetzee (1990)

Could have chosen a few from this writer also, but this is the one that stays with me. A woman returns home with a terminal diagnosis to find a tramp curled up in her doorway… compassionate and wise.

10 War Fever

JG Ballard (1990)

Ballard is my short story writing hero – here he is at his best, putting the short story through all sorts of hoops and jumps. Brilliantly imaginative and inventive. Unable to separate her 10 choices, Claire Kilroy made her picks in no particular order.