Kate Atkinson and the Writer's Choice Read more about Kate Atkinson
Following in the steps of Sebastian Faulks, Philip Pullman, Nick Hornby and Kate Mosse, Kate Atkinson is the latest author to agree to take part in Waterstone's Writer's Choice. She has selected a hugely diverse list that spans a myriad of genres, times and cultures, and which amply demonstrates a passion for both for the classics, and for some of the greatest works in the American fiction canon.
Dickens, Austen, Melville, Sterne and Proust all feature in the selection, as well as American greats such as Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Richard Yates and Joseph Heller, and a clutch of contemporary novelists from across the Atlantic, including Barbara Kingsolver, Angela Carter and Joshua Ferris. All in all, a fantastic selection which we hope you enjoy.
Read more about Kate Atkinson
| See Sebastian Faulks' Writer's Table | See Philip Pullman's Writer's Table |
| See Nick Hornby's Writer's Table | See the Children's Laureate Writers' Table |
| See Kate Mosse's Writer's Table |
"Kate Atkinson is a firm favourite at Waterstone's and we are delighted she has revealed her writer's choice for us. It's a solid gold selection featuring some of the greatest books ever written, from the classics to more contemporary masterpieces. Any fan of Kate Atkinson, or indeed any fan of fine writing, will find much to discover here"
Toby Bourne, Head of Fiction, Waterstone's.
The Writer's Choice
Dirt Music by
Tim Winton
"A journey of redemption, lyrical and harsh by turns. Winton is a superb writer. You breathe the Australian landscape in his books."
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
"The true inheritor of the Brothers Grimm. Dark, glittering, erotic, brilliant, fearless stories."
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
"Metaphor, symbolism, allegory, philosophy, adventure, obsession, and - oh, yes - a whale. One of the world's epic novels, in all ways."
The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov
"I think Chekhov taught everyone who came after how to write stories. A melancholy heart."
The Essential Hemingway by
Ernest Hemingway
"I'm not a fan of Hemingway's novels but he was a fine story writer and his first collection In Our Time, in this anthology, is a seminal modernist text. Writing stripped bare."
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
"An original, thoughtful, thrilling creation of another universe - that allows us to examine our own . Towers above everything else in the genre."
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust
"Monumentally heroic narrative about memory, art and the examined life."
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
"Huck and Jim's picaresque escape story may be a warm, moral, funny yarn but it also takes us to the edge of darkness and back."
Catch 22 by
Joseph Heller
"One of the great novels about war. An absurdist and surreal satire that carries rage and compassion in its heart."
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
"His greatest, most personal work. An almost uncategorizable novel, continually subverting itself as it circles around the horror of the fire-bombing of Dresden."
Troubles by JG Farrell
"Set in Ireland after the First World War this is a funny, dark, poignant and powerful novel by a wonderful writer who died too young."
Just William by Richmal Crompton
"Achingly funny. William Brown is simply the greatest boy in all literature."
The Wind in the Willows by
Kenneth Grahame
"When I was a child I learnt everything I ever needed to know about human relationships from this book."
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
"Surely one of the most surreal books ever written. When I was a child it opened my eyes to the endless possibilities of the imagination."
The Story of the Amulet by Edith Nesbit
"Old-fashioned children? Fantasy and magic? Weird and wonderful adventures? Nesbit is the original and the best. A joy."
Persuasion by Jane Austen
"Anne Eliot is Austen's most melancholic heroine but in the end good constant hearts are rewarded and the foolish and the bad are consigned to the moral abyss. Matchless."
The Collected Short Stories by
F Scott Fitzgerald
"Yes, The Great Gatsby is a truly great novel but Fitzgerald is a wonderful short story writer as well."
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
"The most bleak of American writers and this the most uncompromising exploration of the dark heart of the American Dream, played out in Suburbia."
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
"A book of wanton bad behaviour, betrayal and treachery. A master of precise, lucid prose."
Middlemarch by George Eliot
"One of the greatest English novels. Love and marriage, commerce and greed, disappointment and ambition - the organic fabric of a society in change."
Sixty Stories by
Donald Bartheleme
"The story re-invented again and again in absurd, surreal, moving ways. Like his contemporary Robert Coover, Bartheleme knows that the story is infinitely elastic and never boring."
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
"James's essential theme of the innocence and and naivety of America come into contact with the corruption of the old world. In Isobel Archer he creates a heroine of wonderful, tragic complexity."
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
"Replete with metaphor and symbolism, Marlow's journey down the river into the black night of the soul is one of the most hypnotic and chilling of tales."
Howard's End by EM Forster
"Forster's great and perfect novel about English Society. It is his "condition-of-England" novel and yet it is the characters who remain with you forever."
My Brilliant Career by
Miles Franklin
"Written when the author was only 16 it is a zesty, fresh, occasionally flawed but ultimately uplifting tale of Australian girlhood."
Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
"I claim this to be the first "real" English novel (Trivial Pursuit would disagree!). What it lacks in subtlety and reflection it makes up for with energy, verve and downright sexiness."
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
"One of the first great novels, one of the first great anti-novels. An eccentric epic shaggy-dog story that ends before it begins. Postmodernism? Sterne did it in 1759."
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
"The Greatest American novel not written by an America. Linguistic virtuosity, the most daring of subjects, the most obsessed and untrustworthy of narrators. Sheer brilliance."
Bleak House by
Charles Dickens
"Written when the author was only 16 it is a zesty, fresh, occasionally flawed but ultimately uplifting tale of Australian girlhood."
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
"Ah, Emma, Emma...An intense psychological portrait of a restless, foolish heart. A death-bed scene never bettered. One of the world's greatest novels."
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
"An extraordinary, stream-of-conciousness novel taking place over one day in London. Intelligent, precise, moving."
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
"The mistress of the ingenious plot. Many have imitated, none have bettered."
Then We Came to the End by
Joshua Ferris
"A marmite book. I know a lot of people who don't like it but I absolutely love it. A wickedly funny (and strangely moving) account of disintegration in the work place."
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
"The Poisonwood Bible might be a better novel but I like this lush, lyrical book in which landscape comes alive. A rich fecund work about love and our place in the natural world."
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
"A dystopian vision of what could be. An incredibly sad, moving, intelligent and accessible novel."
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
"'The work is rather too light and bright and sparkling' Austen wrote to her sister. But it isn't and she knew it. It is just perfect."
The Line of Beauty by
Alan Hollinghurst
"A brilliant, witty comedy of manners set in Thatcherite Britain. Shades of Waugh and James but always inimitably Hollinghurst."
Animal Farm by George Orwell
"All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. It may be a dystopian allegory but it has a bleeding, bleating heart."
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
"The original hard-boiled American novel. Crime writing at its classic best."
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
"Hazzard is a writer of extraordinary quality. Exquisite, exact prose, wit, subtlety and humanity always at the core."
