Exclusive: Nick Hornby's top 40 books

Field Notes From a Catastrophe
Elizabeth Kolbert
Kolbert talks to the scientists who really know what’s going on with our planet, and her conclusions are devastating. A scrupulous, elegant, frightening book.

Samaritan
Richard Price
All of Richard Price’s novels are brilliantly plotted and utterly convincing. This is as gripping as his best, with an ethical dimension thrown in for nothing.

Brilliant Orange
David Winner
A clever, erudite, imaginative book about? football. Yes, it can be done, but you have to be as original a thinker as David Winner.

This Boy’s Life
Tobias Wolff
Funny, moving and entirely without self-pity, this book taught a whole generation of writers how to approach autobiography.

Sweet Soul Music
Peter Guralnick
This was one of the all-time top five favourites of Rob Fleming, narrator of High Fidelity, and if it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me. Definitive.

Scenes From a Revolution
Mark Harris
The sharpest book about the movie-making process that I’ve ever read. And like all the best non-fiction, it’s about a lot more than its apparent subject.

Naples ‘44
Norman Lewis
Hilarious, tragic, surreal – a great travel writer’s non-fiction version of Catch 22.

What Good are the Arts?
John Carey
This book, together with the equally brilliant The Intellectuals and the Masses, should help to remove all those stubborn and lazy prejudices you’ve been having trouble with.

Spies
Michael Frayn
A moving, simple, clever, layered novel about the topography of childhood. Michael Frayn is a national treasure and this is, in my opinion, his best book.

Birds of America
Lorrie Moore
I know, I know, you don’t like short stories. How can I convince you that Lorrie Moore’s are as rewarding and as memorable as just about any novel you hold dear?

The Child That Books Built
Francis Spufford
An awe-inspiringly intelligent memoir about our first contact with books – what they did to us, and why they did it.

A Complicated Kindness
Miriam Toews
A fresh, quirky fictional voice, telling us about a community of which we know nothing. What else do you need from contemporary fiction?

Stasiland
Anna Funder
Horrifying, of course, but also weird, and packed with extraordinary narrative incident, this book is a people’s history of the 20th century’s strangest, cruellest and most ambitious thought control experiment.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
A deeply satisfying, brilliantly-imagined epic about twentieth century America, as seen through the prism of its comic books, and the young men who created them.

Random Family
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
An important, astonishingly ambitious piece of extended journalism about two young, attractive, winning and doomed young women, as illuminating and compelling as Michael Apted’s ‘7 Up’ series.

The Republic of Love
Carol Shields
A novel about love that is both smart and deeply romantic, and there aren’t too many of those. Carol Shields’ wise, warm and witty voice is still deeply missed.

Skellig
David Almond
Refusing to read this book on the grounds that you are not a child makes as much sense as refusing to read crime fiction because you are not a criminal. A deep and lovely book.

The Fingersmith
Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters’ fiction is serious entertainment, like all novels should be, and The Fingersmith has one of the most startling plot twists you’ll ever read.

The World’s Wife
Carol-Ann Duffy
In which Mrs Van Winkle, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Midas and others tell their side of the story, with bitter humour and a weary perspicacity.

The Sirens of Titan
Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut didn’t write an ordinary novel, which means that there are a lot of neglected gems. This, which contains a convincingly mundane explanation for why we are all here, is one of my favourites.

Sixty Stories
Donald Barthelme
Barthelme’s short fiction was enormously influential on a whole generation of American writers – it’s also funny, unique, otherworldly.

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
It could have been any of them, just about. But this one is right up there with Great Expectations: comic genius, manic narrative energy, and some – a lot! – of his most memorable characters.

Father And Son
Edmund Gosse
The first misery memoir, but you won’t find any others as self knowing, as deeply felt or as well written as this one. A Victorian Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

The Accidental
Ali Smith
A tour-de-force, a novel about the ordinary and the extraordinary, a book that is both experimental and readable? Ali Smith is a true and valuable British original.

The Invisible Woman
Claire Tomalin
A terrific biography, as absorbing and as acute as a good novel, about the complicated domestic arrangements of our greatest novelist.

The History of Mr Polly
HG Wells
Wells didn’t only write SF – this is a sunny, optimistic comedy about a man who refuses to settle for his lot.

Molesworth
Geoffrey Williams and Ronald Searle
The only work of comic literature that makes me laugh every time I read it – a comfort and a joy.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain
A “Children’s Classic”, according to some. Yes, well, that – and one of the best and most imaginative descriptions of what it means to be an American.

Chronicles
Bob Dylan
A brilliant, angular portrait, of the artist as a consumer of art, and the most thoughtful autobiography of a musician – of a performer in any medium – that I have ever read.

Mystic River
Dennis Lehane
Most works of literature, let’s face it, are not so absorbing that you are in danger of walking into lamp-posts while reading them. But Mystic River is a work of literature. And you will hurt your head.

Fun Home
Alison Bechdel
There have been several wonderful graphic novels published in the last few years, but this is perhaps the richest, and the most moving – it’s as dense and complex as a “proper” book.

The Railway Man
Eric Lomax
A harrowing, deeply moving memoir, full of an inspirational tolerance and forgiveness. If you don’t weep buckets, then you are a robot.

The Giant’s House
Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken has written two brilliant novels and a beautiful memoir. This, her first book, is a luminous, heartbreaking modern classic.

Empire Falls
Richard Russo
An epic, large-hearted, funny, downbeat and altogether magnificent portrait of a dying town, and the people who just about get by there.

Selected Poems
Sophie Hannah
Funny, melancholy, shrewd and real? Sophie Hannah is the heir to the brilliant Wendy Cope’s throne.

The Wife
Meg Wolitzer
A razor-sharp, deceptively tough novel about the sexual politics of writing. And if that sounds a bit like a narrow subject, well it shouldn’t – after reading this, you’ll wonder whether fiction is about anything else.

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Anne Tyler
This book changed my life: I didn’t know novels could be as warm, wise, or engaging as this until I picked it up. I’ve been trying and failing to rip Anne Tyler off ever since.

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
Robinson’s first novel, written a quarter of a century before Gi Lead, her equally dazzling second – a slow, extraordinary, yearning mystical book about the dead, and how they haunt the living.

The Blind Side
Michael Lewis
The Blind Side combines tactical analysis with an account of a young sportsman’s astonishing life and career. With this and Moneyball, Lewis has written the two best sports books of the last five years.

How to Breathe Underwater
Julie Orringer
As fresh and as accomplished a first book as you could hope to find. Julia Orringer’s sad, clear-eyed stories are hard to forget.

Nick Hornby’s Writer’s Table will launch in selected Waterstone’s stores and at Waterstones.com on March 5