Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Austen on sisters — one all feeling, one all restraint. Not my top Austen, but still a delight.
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★ 5Persuasion
Jane Austen
Anne Elliot, older and wiser, gets a second chance at the love she was talked out of. Austen's most quietly romantic. That letter.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
My favorite Austen, obviously. I reread it whenever I want to feel better about everything.
★ 5Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
Lydia Davis
Lydia Davis can do more in two sentences than most writers manage in twenty pages. Tiny, strange, razor-sharp stories.
★ 5The Georges' wife
Elizabeth Jolley
The last of Elizabeth Jolley's Vera Wright trilogy, about a young woman who becomes maid to one sibling and mistress to another. Spare, tender, and quietly devastating — it swept the Australian book prizes for a reason.
★ 5Circle of Friends
Maeve Binchy
Binchy at her coziest, all friendship and first love and small-town Irish life in the '50s. Comfort reading that still has teeth.