John Baker’s Blog

Mourning Ruby by Helen Dunmore
The Blank Page by KC Constantine **
Death of a Murderer by Rupert Thomson ***
Beyond Sleep by Willem Frederik Hermans ****
The Blackwater Lightship by Colm Tóibín ***
American Pastoral by Philip Roth***
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi ***
In The Wake by Per Petterson ***
Joey’s Case by KC Constantine ***
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman *****
Afterwards by Rachel Seiffert **
Why Don’t You Stop Talking by Jackie Kay ***
The Sweetest Thing by Fiona Shaw ***
Are You She? short stories edited by Lesley Glaister ***
The City and the House by Natalia Ginzburg ***
Havoc, In Its Third Year by Ronan Bennett ****
The Story of the Night by Colm Tóibín ****
A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler **
Flights of Love by Bernhard Schlink ****
Go Down Moses and other stories by William Faulkner *****
The Same Sea by Amos Oz ****
Limestone & Clay by Lesley Glaister ****
The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman ***
The Darkroom of Damocles by WF Hermans ****
The Plague by Albert Camus *****
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson ****
The Outsider by Albert Camus****
Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood****
The South by Colm Tóibín ****
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee *****
In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant **
Meat Country by JM Coetzee ***
What Bengali Widows Cannot Eat by Chitrita Benerji ***
The Butcher of Bermondsey by Graham Swift ***
Say You Love Me by Marion Husband *
Restless by William Boyd ***
The Catastrophist by Ronan Bennett ****
Still Here by Linda Grant **
The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler ***
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe *****
Raven Black by Ann Cleeves ****
To Siberia by Per Petterson ****
Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson ***
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood **
Jane Austen by Sylvia Townsend Warner ****
The Republic of Love by Carol Shields ***
Be Cool by Elmore Leonard ***
Jane Austen by Carol Shields ***
Careful! by Richard Madelin ****
The Perfect Egg by Aldo Buzzi *****
Four Fathers by Ray French, James Nash, Tom Palmer & John Siddique ***
Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood ***
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut ****
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector *****
Dressing Up for the Carnival by Carol Shields ***
The Heather Blazing by Colm Tóibín *****
The Orange Fish by Carol Shields ***
Various Miracles by Carol Shields ***
On Literature by Umberto Eco ****
White by Marie Darrieussecq ****
Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad ***
A Hundred White Daffodils by Jane Kenyon ***
Saving Caravaggio by Neil Griffiths ***
Sky Burial by Xinran **
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niefenegger **
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes ****
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith **
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels ***
Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx *****
The Colour by Rose Tremain ***
The Digger’s Game by George V Higgins ***
The Quest Hero by WH Auden ***
The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism by Northrop Frye ****
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson ****
The Novel and America by Leslie A Fielder ***
The Creative Experience in Poetry by Herbert Read ****
The Political Theatre Reconsidered by Eric Bentley ***
The Fate of Pleasure by Lionel Trilling ***
Symbolism and Fiction by Harry Levin ***
The Death of Tragedy by George Steiner ***
Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman ****
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell ***
A Brief History of Time by Stephen W Hawking ****
The Art of Poetry by Paul Valéry ***
A Passion for Tango by David Turner ***
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski ***
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez ***
Blood Memory - an autobiography by Martha Graham ***
With Your Crooked Heart by Helen Dunmore ***
Playing Sardines by Michèle Roberts ***
Days and Nights of Love and War by Eduardo Galeano *****
Northern Lights by Philip Pullman (abandoned half-way) *
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates ****
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut ***
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates *****
Ghostwritten by David Mitchell ***
The Sound & the Fury by William Faulkener *****
The Ikon Maker by Desmond Hogan *****
The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vazquez Montalban ***
True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway ***
Absolute Friends by John le Carre ***
Life of Pi by Yann Martel ***
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunnant ***
You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe ***
The Return of the Dancing Master by Henning Mankell ****
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald *****
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy *****
The Blind Man of Seville by Robert Wilson ***
The American Boy by Andrew Taylor **
Tokyo by Mo Hayder *
Samuel Pepys - The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin *
Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman ***
Sheer Blue Bliss by Lesley Glaister ***
Perfume by Patrick Suskind ***
Always a Body to Trade by KC Constantine ****
The Tupamaros, The Unmentionables by Major Carlos Wilson **
The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks ****
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen *
Atomised by Michel Houellebecq ***
Don’t Look Back by Karin Fossum *
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood *****
Mary Swann by Carol Shields ***
The Forest of the Hours by Kirstin Ekman *****
The Hours by Michael Cunningham ****
Plainsong by Kent Haruf ***
Brick Lane by Monica Ali ***
The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor *****
Family Values by KC Constantine ****
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham ***
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson ***
Unless by Carol Shields ***
Good Sons by KC Constantine ****
The Dark Room by RK Narayan ***
The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy ****
Hen’s Teeth by Manda Scott ***
Disgrace by JM Coetzee *****
Burial of Ghosts by Ann Cleeves ***
Zennor in Darkness by Helen Dunmore ****
Thinks . . . by David Lodge **
Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips ****
The Private Parts of Women by Lesley Glaister ****
Death and the Oxford Box by Veronica Stallwood ***
The Investigation by Juan Jose Saer ***
The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert ****
The Tulip Touch by Anne Fine ****
Russian Disco by Wladimir Kaminer **
The Reader by Bernhard Schlink ****
Dockers and Detectives by Ken Worpole ****
Heartbreak Tango by Manuel Puig ***
Foe by JM Coetzee **
Shame by Bergljot Hobæk Haff ***
Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ by William Godwin ***
A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark by Mary Wollstonecraft ****
The Sleeping and the Dead by Ann Cleeves ***

* unfinished
** disappointing
*** good
**** recommended
***** exceptional