A while ago I asked my Facebook friends if they had to recommend one book (an almost impossible task, I know) which it would be. As I am aiming to increase the variety of what I read I summarised the responses and am slowly working through them (not to the exclusion of my usual choices though). What a great list it is turning out to be – which is no surprise given the erudition of my friends who span the globe. I thought others might like to see the list too. I hope I didn’t miss any, apologies if so.

Oh and my desert island book? That would have to be I, Claudius by Robert Graves. Anyway, here is the list (in no particular order):

cover	title	author
	The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig	Zweig, Stefan
	Post Captain	O’Brian, Patrick
	Iacocca: An Autobiography	Iacocca, Lee
	The End of the Affair	Greene, Graham
	The Painted Veil	Maugham, W. Somerset
	The Great Gatsby	Fitzgerald, F. Scott
	The English Patient	Ondaatje, Michael
	How To Be A Brit	Mikes, George
	Three Men in a Boat (Three Men, #1)	Jerome, Jerome K.
	Isle of Passion	Restrepo, Laura
	Death Comes for the Archbishop	Cather, Willa
	Oscar et la dame rose	Schmitt, Éric-Emmanuel
	The Unbearable Lightness of Being	Kundera, Milan
	The Fountain Overflows	West, Rebecca
	The Pillars of the Earth(Kingsbridge, #1)	Follett, Ken*
	The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas	Assis, Machado de
	Odd John	Stapledon, Olaf
	Star Maker	Stapledon, Olaf
	Pilgrim’s Inn (Eliots of Damerosehay, #2)	Goudge, Elizabeth
	Jane Eyre	Brontë, Charlotte
	Don Quixote	Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
	Mémoires d’Hadrien	Yourcenar, Marguerite
	A Christmas Memory	Capote, Truman
	Cold Mountain	Frazier, Charles
	Death and the Penguin	Kurkov, Andrey
	Il cavaliere e la morte	Sciascia, Leonardo

cover	title	author
	The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide, #1)	Adams, Douglas
	Dune (Dune Chronicles #1)	Herbert, Frank
	Master and Commander(Aubrey & Maturin, #1)	O’Brian, Patrick
	Exodus	Uris, Leon
	The Sirian Experiments	Lessing, Doris