40 Books for 40 Years: Claire Kilroy gives us top 10 books since 1977

Unable to separate her 10 choices, Claire made her picks in no particular order...

Athena

John Banville (1995)

This is a great break-up novel. No one articulates heartache and confusion like Banville, except the king of them all: Nabokov. Athena is part three of a trilogy, and thus isn’t as widely read as it should be. You don’t have to read the first two, but you’d be denying yourself a pleasure. Freddy Montgomery kills a girl while stealing a priceless painting in part one, The Book of Evidence, which was inspired by the GUBU affair in the 1980s. He atones and changes his name in the second novel, Ghosts. In Athena, he’s back on the streets where he is approached to authenticate a cache of stolen paintings by criminal warlord, The Da. There he meets A, the mysterious femme fatale of the piece. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s bonkers, it’s ingenious. It contains some of the best writing ever written.

The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt (2013)

Another stolen painting novel. A mother and her 13-year-old son are in the Met, New York, when a bomb goes off. The boy loses his beloved mother (his father abandoned them) but steals a priceless painting, The Goldfinch. There is something heartrending about people who try to locate what they have lost in a piece of art. They are the true romantics, always on the brink of the sublime, but never quite getting there.

Headlong

Michael Frayn (1999)

And yet another painting novel. Middle-aged English academic couple with baby move to “the country” to write books. Husband, a hopeless dreamer, falls in with the local toffs and spots what he thinks might be a priceless painting on their wall. Husband ties himself in knots trying to acquire priceless painting, which may not be priceless at all. What unfolds is excruciatingly funny and sad.

The Woman Upstairs

Claire Messud (2013)

A book about an artist, not the work of art, this time – although the work of art appears towards the end, with devastating consequences. The woman upstairs is an artist, a thwarted one. She is in her 40s, single, lonely, childfree. She wants to be an artist but she teaches art instead. An exotic family moves in downstairs. The woman upstairs observes them and falls in love with them. It all goes horribly, horribly wrong.

And Then We Came To The End

Joshua Ferris (2007)

Who knew that a book about office politics could be so funny, and then so sad? Beautiful ending.

The Virgin Suicides

Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)

Another novel where the power, as with Ferris’s, lies in its use of the choral voice. A bunch of sad old men talk about the suicides of the young girls they loved when they themselves were young.

Be Near Me

Andrew O’Hagan (2006)

A gay English priest, grieving for his dead love, kisses a Scottish teenager one night after getting high, projecting onto the boy qualities he doesn’t possess. A witch hunt ensues. A man is broken all over again. O’Hagan’s prose is stunning.

The Forgotten Waltz

Anne Enright (2011)

A break-up novel in which the fall-out mirrors the fall-out in Ireland after the boom, and a young woman throws her future away on an older man who has nothing much to offer her. Enright is, as ever, frighteningly incisive in her observations, and her protagonist is as tender as she is acerbic.

Netherland

Joseph O’Neill (2008)

Another fine break-up novel by a hardcore prose stylist about a man cast adrift in New York because his wife has taken herself and their child back to London.

Skippy Dies

Paul Murray (2010)

The best novels are really funny and really sad. Skippy Dies is really funny until suddenly it really isn’t. The sadness of it gets you right in the solar plexus.