Reading List
Lily King
Novelist
Lily King published The Pleasing Hour in 1999 and spent the following years writing novels about families under strain, but the book that reached furthest is Euphoria, which took the entanglement between Margaret Mead and two rival anthropologists in New Guinea and turned it into a study of ambition and desire. It won the inaugural Kirkus Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. She is unusually good on the moment a life changes direction.
01
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
“One of my favourite sections of any book in literature is the part where Tess goes to work on the dairy farm and meets Angel Claire. She’s just had such a hard, hard time, and then she has this experience of being provided for and taken care of by kind people. For once in her life, she’s safe and secure. Happiness suddenly happens to her, and it’s so unexpected.” — via Interview, October 2025
02
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Brooklyn
by Colm Tóibín
“I don’t want to give too much away, but she’s already very attached to Tony, but then—after maybe nine months or a year—she has to go back because her sister has died, and there she meets Jim. They have the summer together, then she, very abruptly and without saying goodbye, leaves and goes back to her life in Brooklyn.” — via Interview, October 2025
03
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Persuasion
by Jane Austen · 1817
“Persuasion is wonderful in that sense: we meet Anne Elliott when she is 27 years old, having had this big love eight years before.” — via Interview, October 2025
04
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The Evening of the Holiday
by Shirley Hazzard
“So it starts slowly, and I think reluctantly, on both of their sides. But the minute they start speaking to each other, they have this wonderful, literature-fueled conversation that carries through the rest of the book.” — via Interview, October 2025
05
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Man Gone Down
A Novel
by Michael Thomas
“They have three kids together. It takes place over the course of four days while he is in utter crisis trying to save his family. The love story is really the love of one man trying to keep his family together, when every single force that could be working against him is working against him.” — via Interview, October 2025
06
Amazon ↗
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
“I know Angel has his issues, but Hardy is also using him to demonstrate society, cultural mores.” — via Interview, October 2025
