I revere Chekhov as a writer – of short stories. And I’m absolutely fascinated by the man himself, also. Any volume of Chekhov’s mature stories – the ones he wrote in the last ten years of his life – will contain masterworks but if you only had to read one Chekhov story then his longest, “My Life,” will open the door to his particular genius. His sensibility is completely modern, it seems to me; he speaks to us today as much as to his 19th century contemporaries.

This is a unique novel. How often can you say that? A 999-line poem with hundreds of pages of completely wrong-headed footnotes. Only Nabokov could have pulled off this extraordinary feat of narration (and beautiful poetry, it has to be said). Mesmerizing prose – and also very funny indeed.

This is perhaps Muriel Spark’s most autobiographical novel but it is also a great exemplar of her extraordinary gifts. The tone of voice is perfect – sly, deadpan, brusque – which is what gives her fiction such “zing”. Her heroine, Mrs Hawkins, is a wonderfully shrewd self-portrait. Formidable.

This is Dickens’s last completed novel and arguably his finest and darkest. It is also the great novel of London. Written and published in the 1860s, the portrait of the city still – amazingly — resonates in the 21st century.

Bishop is in my personal Pantheon of poets (along with W.H.Auden, Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens and a few choice others). What’s remarkable is just how small Bishop’s corpus of work is. Her huge reputation rests on a mere seventy or so published poems. They are perfectly wrought, often labored-over for years. The precision of language is sensational.

This could be the perfect comic novel – the misadventures of a young man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Order disturbed, chaos and disorder, order restored. Waugh’s immaculate deadpan prose is amazing and the book is extremely funny. The chapter detailing Mr Salter’s visit to Boot Magna in darkest England is the funniest piece of comic writing ever.

This is not regarded as Updike’s best novel but when I read it in my early 20s it blew me away. Suddenly I saw the human condition depicted with a clarity – and beauty – that I hadn’t experienced before. It is a pure distillate of the Updike-ian world-view.

This isn’t the Life of Henry Brulard – it’s a pseudonym, swiftly discarded. It’s actually the life of Henri Beyle, aka “Stendhal”, and is one of the most extraordinary autobiographies ever written, up there with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Confessions. Candid, tormented, passionate, outspoken – the man who was Stendhal comes vibrantly, unforgettably alive.

I knew Beryl Bainbridge a little and I think she is a most underrated British novelist. Like Muriel Spark her take on the world and its denizens is amazingly clear-eyed. And like Spark, again, she sees oddness and eccentricity as the defining features of human relationships. Very funny and very true at the same time.

I read this novel in my teens and it opened my eyes to the transforming power of fiction. I was born and raised in West Africa and West Africa (in WW2) is the setting for the story. Here were landscapes, people, situations, sights and smells I knew intimately, transformed and immortalised by a novelist’s skillful hand. I think this book was the one that made me want to be a writer.