Het kwintet van David Hewson

I, Claudius and Claudius the God by Robert Graves.

A classic tragedy - republican turns dictator - written in the form of a false document, the rediscovered diary of the cripple-turned-emperor Claudius. A touch over-written in places, for modern tastes anyway, but breathtaking in its ambition and humanity, and two books I reread constantly.

The Wine-Dark Sea by Robert Aickman.

One of the great lost writers, Aickman wrote 'strange tales', short stories with a touch of Jorge Luis Borges mingled with a very upper class English consciousness. Aickman gloried in the freedom to leave stories unresolved. You really don't know what's happening sometimes, and that makes it all the more tantalising.

The Godfather by Mario Puzo.

It's not the Italian connection that makes me admire Puzo's work so much. It's the courage he showed in depicting the nuclear family - supposedly the rock of society - as something much darker and fundamentally evil. He always described this book as a deliberate commercial shot designed to make him money, and thought the less of it for that. Writers know nothing sometimes. 

One Shot by Lee Child.

Child's Jack Reacher is one of the most intriguing figures in modern popular fiction, a near-biblical figure, some fallen angel wreaking vengeance on those the law can't touch. Child has barely described Reacher physically, the man has scarcely a single endearing trait, he never changes, never shows anyone much in the way of normal sympathy. Yet there's something desperately gripping about him. Fascinating.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle.

I regard my principal subject as justice more than crime. But when I think of crime I think of that monstrous dog on the moors. For me this, more than Christie, Hammett and Chandler, is what crime should be about. Damned decent covers in a glorious English setting behaving with an evil murderous intent, as only the English can.  

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi. 

The Italian doctor, writer and painter Levi wrote this autobiographical memoir on the run from the Nazis in wartime Florence. It tells of his time in political exile in the south of Italy during the Mussolini era. Funny, sad and wise, it revealed a side of the Mezzogiorno, the unknown, almost pagan south, that still rings true today.