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"Camus helps you become 'the one who you are', and the revolt he incites brings you into a recognition of common human suffering." (The Guardian, 5.7.13)
THEMES; alienation; voicelessness; identity

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"The Meursault Investigation" by Kamel Daoud 

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"The Meursault Investigation" by Kamel Daoud 

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Retelling Camus’ "The Outsider" through Arab eyes, this debut novel develops a specifically Algerian perspective on the absurd condition.

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"Post Office", "Factotum" & "Women" by Charles Bukowski

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"Post Office", "Factotum" & "Women" by Charles Bukowski

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Uncompromising accounts of life on the edge. (Check out Bukowski's poetry too.)

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Two strangers collide in contemporary London:  Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist, and Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes. From this chance encounter disparate lives come together.
THEMES: love & death; man & nature; obsession; betrayal

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Sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organised campaigns of murder engulfing the island,  Anil returns to her homeland of Sri Lanka

Pair with "Happiness" by Aminatta Forna?

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"American Psycho"  by Brett Easton Ellis

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"American Psycho"  by Brett Easton Ellis

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Told in first person narrative by Patrick Bateman, a Manhattan investment banker and serial killer. Not for the faint hearted!
THEMES: greed/materialism & consumption; hyper-masculinity.

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“The things you own end up owning you. It's only after you lose everything that you're free to do anything.”

Pair with "American Psycho"  by Brett Easton Ellis? (Similar themes & unreliable narrators.)

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A city is mysteriously struck by an epidemic of blindness which spreads rapidly and indiscriminately...
THEMES: the fragility of society; government control; human nature; survival

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Four years after the blindness epidemic, 83 % of the election ballots cast are blank. Horrified, the government places the city under siege and relocates, sure that chaos will ensue and that the ''subversives" will flounder.

Pair with "Blindess" by Jose Saramago?

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"An astonishing novel that captures the fine balance of happiness and the unforeseen threats that can destroy it. A brilliant, thrilling page-turner that will keep readers on the edge of their seats." (Book Browse)
THEMES: the inexplicable nature of evil; family relationships

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"“The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other.”

Pair with "Saturday" by Ian McEwan?

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First published in 1962, J.G. Ballard's novel imagines a terrifying future in which solar radiation and global warming have melted the  polar ice caps and the oceans have risen to engulf most of the major cities of Europe and America.

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In contrast to Ballard's earlier novel, this describes a world in which water is scarce.

Compare and contrast?

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"Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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"Love in the Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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The lives of individuals are woven together in a society faced with a plague-like health crisis.
THEMES: suffering in the name of love; fear & intolerance of aging; emotional & physical plague

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"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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"One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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The story of the fictional Colombian town Macondo and the rise and fall of its founders, the Buendía family.
THEMES: love & perseverance; fate & free will;

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"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

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"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

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Love dystopian literature? Try Margaret Atwood &/or Naomi Alderman.
THEMES: the subjugation of women;  the manipulation of power; patriarchy; gender conflict

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SECONDARY SOURCE

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Margaret Atwood had a cameo in the television series based on her book The Handmaid's Tale. She played an Aunt in a scene where a woman is ritually shamed by a group of handmaids for "getting herself" gang raped at the age of 14. "Her fault, she led them on," is the chant they use. Atwood says she found the scene "horribly upsetting", although it was possibly not so wrenching to write as it was to enact or, later, for us to watch.

In the original book, a few deft sentences lead the reader, not into the magnetising shaming of another human being, but to the narrator Offred's insight into her own complicity. "I used to think well of myself," she says. "I didn't then." The scene is moral, not sensational; it works through the brain, not through the eyes. This is one reason Atwood's work feels so ageless and necessary. She thinks.

Atwood certainly has had an enormous amount to think about since her novel went supernova, not just as the hugely successful television adaptation, but as a powerful symbol of resistance to the misogyny of Donald Trump and the Christian rightwing. The series became a kind of visual enlargement of the agonies of the age, or the female agonies at least. It was sometimes hard to look, or to look away.

In The Testaments, Atwood reclaims the right to consider such difficulties rather than simply imagine them. She is interested not in how people become degraded, as objects (that is so easily done), but how they became morally compromised.

The novel picks up 15 or 16 years after Offred disappears to an unknown fate at the end of The Handmaid's Tale. There are three narrators, two of them young and idealistic, one of them old and endlessly cunning. The most compelling portrait is that of wickedness - of course it is. The story is driven and described by the infamous Aunt Lydia, and she is just as terrifying, in her astringency, as you would expect her to be.

In Lydia's world view, people rise and fall by strength or weakness, and justice is a kind of theatre. "Innocent men denying their guilt sound exactly like guilty men, as I am sure you have noticed, my reader." She appeals to the heartless survivor in all of us - at least this is what she seems to say, that when the chips are down, we will revert to our most primitive state. A crowd of imprisoned women is described as "crocodiles", ready to "leap, thrash about and snap". Their first sighting of a mass execution does not dull their appetite for food, in fact it does the opposite: afterwards, Lydia is given an egg sandwich and, "I am ashamed to say, I gobbled it up with relish".

To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of recent years reveal the same themes

Her induction into the order of Aunts is described with a chilling vigour. Tortured, imprisoned and tested, she is given a choice, and she chooses "the path most travelled by", one of compromise, betrayal and lies. The first book was good on the envy between women, when they have no power; The Testaments looks at collaboration - another vice of the oppressed. Lydia, however, collaborates as an equal, not as a victim; she is not in thrall. Indeed, she is happy to destroy women who have internalised the values of the patriarchal regime: one girl, Shunammite, is coldly sacrificed to her own silliness, a move that Lydia seems to enjoy.

Lydia may be in charge of the novel, but hers is not the only point of view. The younger women, introduced as Agnes and Daisy, have not lived a life of compromise, they do not remember the old days and they betray no one. Daisy is as bolshy and idealistic as any other teenager, Agnes is loyal and ready to love. The girls are courageous and hopeful and they venture out in the second half of the novel like the heroes of old. They believe in friendship: they even witness the perseverance, after death, of a person's soul.

Aunt Lydia, right, in the TV adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale. Photograph: Sophie Giraud/Hulu

The dystopia of Gilead has worn very well, even though its putative future date now lies in our collective past. People use computers, but the internet, that constant plot spoiler, has been more or less suppressed, and with it, the tendency of history to spin off into unlikely or cruel absurdities. Trump could not exist in this enclosed universe. Gilead was first imagined by Atwood after living in West Berlin before the fall of the wall. It is a place where people do not know things, including the sins of those in charge. Information is used at the end of the book as a liberating force rather than a randomising one. Authority exists, it has been centralised, and it can be overthrown.

In The Handmaid's Tale, Offred refers, with amazing prescience, to "false news": in The Testaments the news has turned "fake". The word "slut" is more frequently employed, but otherwise there is no need to change what was, in 1985, so properly realised. As Atwood says, everything in this future dystopia has happened somewhere already, and Gilead owes much to the US's Puritan past. She is strong on idleness and good manners as weapons of oppression; for Atwood, perhaps the worst possible fate in life is to have nothing to do all day.

As a novel, The Handmaid's Tale is held together by the sexual tensions between the characters. It is, among other things, a claustrophobic book about adultery, or one in which adultery has been turned to ritualised rape. The characters in The Testaments do not yearn and mourn as Offred did. They have, at the beginning of the book, been scattered by happenstance. This open, plot-driven novel brings them together in a way that owes less to Pinter's Betrayal, and more to a Shakespearean comedy of children lost and found.

In all this losing and finding, Aunt Lydia behaves as the novelist does, bringing people together for the purpose of plot, which in her case is also plotting. The novel is her conspiracy of one.

Some Gilead facts invented by the readers make it into The Testaments. "June" was chosen by fans as Offred's given name, and Atwood is happy to accept the suggestion. "Nicole", a baby who first appears in the TV series is, in The Testaments, nearly fully grown.

You might call this interleaving of book and reader postmodern, but there is more here than a posh writer's punning. Gilead, the fiction, is a kind of overgrown child. Atwood has taken it by the hand and made an open, free-running story, one that remains, as ever, deeply informed. In writing The Testaments, she also reclaims its world from all the people who think they own it now: the writers of fanfiction and the television producers (she told them they could not kill Lydia, apparently). A story that feels universal is, actually, hers: she gets to decide.

Perhaps no other writer has managed her own phenomenon with so much grace and skill. The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct, beautifully turned. All over the reading world, the history books are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood's name is written at the top of it. To read this book is to feel the world turning, as the unforeseeable shifts of the last few years reveal the same old themes. It is also a chance to see your own political life flash in front of your eyes, to remember how the world was 30 years ago and say: "If she was right in 1985, she is more right today."
* Anne Enright's The Green Road is published by Vintage. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood is published by Chatto (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

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The Testaments by Margaret Atwood review - a dazzling follow-up to The Handmaid's Tale

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Margaret Atwood had a cameo in the television series based on her book The Handmaid's Tale . She played an Aunt in a scene where a woman is ritually shamed by a group of handmaids for "getting herself" gang raped at the age of 14.

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THEMES: power, privilege & toxic masculinity

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"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" by F Scott Fitzgerald

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"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" by F Scott Fitzgerald

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Love "The Great Gatsby"? Try something else by Fitzgerald.

Benjamin Button is born as an 80-year-old man in New Orleans just after World War I and proceeds to grow younger as time passes.

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"The Man Who Planted Trees" by Jean Giono

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"The Man Who Planted Trees" by Jean Giono

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Prefer shorter reads? Try novellas. This one is about hope and how one man's efforts can change the future.

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Another shorter text. This is a moving novella about finding dignity and beauty in solitude.

Pair with another text with similar themes (e.g. "Stoner" by John Williams)?

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"John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero." (Goodreads)

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A mesmerising story of love and war set in the nightmare of Flanders.
THEMES: love & loss in wartime; the trauma of war

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"Captain Corelli's Mandolin" by Louis de Bernieres

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"Captain Corelli's Mandolin" by Louis de Bernieres

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Set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Italian and German, a young Italian officer is at first shunned by the locals but then falls in love.
THEMES: love & loss in wartime

Pair with "Birdsong" by Sebastian Faulks?

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"The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressel

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"The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists" by Robert Tressel

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Match with "Hard Times" by Charles Dickens and/or "The Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck?
THEMES: the exploitative nature of capitalism; the impact of poverty

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Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia,  "a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; about the odds of breaking with the past and about the lure of music". (Book Browse)

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This free course is designed to develop the analytical skills you need for a more in-depth study of literary texts. You will learn about narrative events and perspectives, the setting of novels, types of characterisation and genre.

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This free course is designed to develop the analytical skills you need for a more in-depth study of literary texts. You will learn about narrative events and perspectives, the setting of novels, types of characterisation and genre.

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Really helpful for Advanced Higher English dissertation and textual analysis.

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approaching prose fiction: 1 why do we read prose fiction?

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Do you want to get more out of your reading? This free course, Approaching prose fiction, is designed to develop the analytical skills you need for a more in-depth study of literary texts. You will...

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A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story?
THEMES: memory (illusion of) &  forgetting; absence; nostalgia for homeland

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"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundera

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"The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundera

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In seven integrated parts, this novel shares the longings of  men and women living in oppressive worlds.

Pair with "Ignorance" by Milan Kundera?

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“Happiness was different in childhood...a matter simply of accumulation, of taking things - new experiences, new emotions - and applying them like so many polished tiles...”
THEMES: the unpredictable power of memory; childhood; loss

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The Seaby John Banville(Picador, £7.99)

It won last year's Booker prize, so does not exactly need the oxygen of publicity: but this almost airless, deliberately stifled book is one of the more interesting titles that the prize has been conferred upon recently.

The writer who most immediately springs to mind when reading Banville is Beckett. This is more than a matter of spot-the-influence. If you are going to take as a conscious model the pernickety qualifications and sighing cadences of Beckett's great mid-period prose - not to mention one or two of his themes, such as the possibility of confusion between memory and invention - then it is more than a question of style; style itself is about more than a question of style. Banville has said in an interview: "When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style."

That, it has to be said, strikes me as being about as teasingly unreliable a declaration ("blessed"? "redeemed"? "everything"? The redemption in The Sea is pretty austere) as any of those made by any of his narrators, for whom unreliability comes as naturally and easily as exhalation. Even the unreliability is unreliable. "The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the town, I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away." Is he making all this up? Yes; and no. And yes.

The story, such as it is, is narrated by one Max Morden (not quite, we are told quite late on, the name he was christened with), a widowed art historian, who is returning to a seaside boarding-house he once knew as a child on the cusp of adolescence. He has arrived there in order to deal with, in some roundabout way, the death of his wife from cancer. But the reason he lodges at Miss Vavasour's comically moribund guest-house is also because, when he was young, Something Happened there, and the novel only reveals what that was at the end.

There may be readers who will be frustrated by the way the novel takes its own sweet time to get there, pausing frequently to tidy up the stray linguistic formulations that compromise what we think we are doing when we remember. And sometimes when we invent, it is like a kind of remembering: "I imagine an old seafarer dozing by the fire, landlubbered at last, and the winter gale rattling the window frames. Oh, to be him. To have been him."

But Morden has been someone else - although I wish English had a tense that could encompass all the ambiguities in that last "has". There's a moment in Malone Dies where the narrator breaks off from one of the stories he tells to pass the time, and says: "What stink of artifice." Banville has written penetratingly on Beckett and clearly knows how to banish the stink; the best way is to acknowledge its presence, or the possibility of its presence. The knowledge that everything is, or could be, contingent - on the facts, a faulty memory, the act of reading a book - is what, paradoxically, gives this story its weight and plausibility. (Another great conjuring-up of childhood memory, Proust's A la Recherche ... , is another perfume that wafts up from the page as you read.)

Not that this is a book full of literary references, the kind ready to exclude those who don't get them. You don't need to be aware of them to feel the uncanny, haunting atmosphere. This is not so much a novel about memory as an examination of what it is to have a memory at all, to have had experiences that seem to be on the brink of slipping away. Banville's book recalls such poised masters as Proust and Beckett (and, indeed, James) not because he wants you to know how well-read he is, but to invoke a kind of guarantee that he knows fiction has responsibilities to its subjects as well as its readers. And that we can mention such writers in the same breath as Banville should alert us to the fact that we can count ourselves privileged to be around at the same time as he is.

· To order The Sea for £7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.
Topics

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The Seaby John Banville(Picador, £7.99) It won last year's Booker prize, so does not exactly need the oxygen of publicity: but this almost airless, deliberately stifled book is one of the more interesting titles that the prize has been conferred upon recently. The writer who most immediately springs to mind when reading Banville is Beckett.

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"The Moon and Sixpence" by W. Somerset Maugham

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"The Moon and Sixpence" by W. Somerset Maugham

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Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker, abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter
THEMES: passion; disillusionment; the quest for purpose in life

Pair with "Of Human Bondage" by W. Somerset Maugham?

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The spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautama Buddha.
THEMES: the search for enlightenment; self discovery; truth & illusion

Pair with "The Moon and Sixpence" by Somerset Maugham or another Hesse text?

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"Narcissus and Goldmund" by Hermann Hesse

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"Narcissus and Goldmund" by Hermann Hesse

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A moving, symbolic novel of friendship between an intellectual teacher and a restless, wandering artist.
THEMES: good & evil; joy & sorrow, thinking & dreaming

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"The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

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"The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

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"A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication." (Goodreads)
THEMES: regret; memory; responsibility

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Opening lines: "You put two things together that have not been put together before. And the world is changed."
THEMES: grief; love & loss

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"The Kiss of the Spider Woman" by Manuel Puig

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"The Kiss of the Spider Woman" by Manuel Puig

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In an Argentine prison, two men share a cell and both are gradually transformed by their guarded but growing friendship. THEMES: forbidden love; desire; repression

Pair with "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov?

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Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, doomed passion for a young girl.
THEMES: forbidden love; desire; repression

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America, 1998. An aging classics professor is forced to retire when his colleagues accuse him of racism.
THEMES: identity & self-invention; morality; rebellion

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“Spellbinding . . . a seductive and arresting coming-of-age story.” (The New York Times Book Review)

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"Do Not Say we Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

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"Do Not Say we Have Nothing" by Madeleine Thien

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Canada 1990. Ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home, a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests.

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"South of the Border, West of the Sun" by Haruki  Murakami

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"South of the Border, West of the Sun" by Haruki  Murakami

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Living in an affluent Tokyo suburb, middle aged Hajime wants for nothing. When Shimamoto shows up one rainy night Hajime starts to question everything.
THEMES: human fragility;  obsession; longing for the past

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"The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead

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"The Underground Railroad" by Colson Whitehead

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"This thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south contains extraordinary prose and uncomfortable home truths" (The Guardian, 9.10.16)

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Addressing another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a reform school in the Jim Crow era which barred African-Americans from being full American citizens.

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"The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick deWitt

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"The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick deWitt

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Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it.
THEMES: conflict; corruption; loneliness

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"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

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"No Country for Old Men" by Cormac McCarthy

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June 1980, Terrell County, Texas...Sheriff Bell reflects on the increasingly out of control violence in the area. Meanwhile, a hitman  escapes custody by strangling to death the deputy who arrested him.

Pair with "The Sisters Brothers" by Patrick deWitt?

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After Melanie's parents die in a plane crash, she and her siblings go to live with their tyrant of an uncle. A malevolent fairytale with lots of gothic elements.
THEMES: the search for self; loss of innocence; family relations

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"Grief is the Thing with Fathers" by Max Porter

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"Grief is the Thing with Fathers" by Max Porter

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Something totally different: "the dark, comic, wild, beautiful prose-poem-novel". ("The Guardian" 8.3.19)

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"Shimmering with the uncanny: it's a remarkable feat of literary virtuosity." (Sunday Times)

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"Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo

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"Girl, Woman, Other" by Bernardine Evaristo

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"The interconnected stories of a group of black British women raise timeless questions about feminism and race." ("The Guardian" 8.5.19)

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The life story of a young woman born at the end of the 20th century raises questions of misogyny and institutional oppression  that are relevant to all of us.

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"Ten Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World" by Elif Shafak

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"Ten Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World" by Elif Shafak

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"Shafak takes a piercing, unflinching look at the trauma women’s minds and bodies are subjected to in a social system defined by patriarchal codes... a brutal book... but ultimately life-affirming." ("The Guardian", 12.9.19)

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"In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophia."

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"Crime fiction for the connoisseur." (The Times)

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Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called in from Dublin to investigate a murder at Ballyglass House..."
THEMES: hypocrisy; social class; secrecy.

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Winner of the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2018

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"At Night All Blood is Black" by David Diop

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"At Night All Blood is Black" by David Diop

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Described as a “powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel” (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War
THEMES: the horror or war; man's descent into madness.

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"Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?"
THEMES: regret; choices.

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"A work of environmental literary fiction about a woman named Lizzie who gets sucked into the world of climate doomers and doomsday preppers."

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"This exquisitely written debut novel sizzles with cruelties and betrayals, as ordinary family life in India turns into a nightmare."