11 Hands-Down Favorites from a Bestselling Mystery Writer

Daphne du Maurier is best known for her masterpiece in toxic love, REBECCA, but this story of Philip Ashley’s obsessive infatuation with the enigmatic Rachel is just as compulsive. Is Rachel a grieving widow or a murderess? The reader can only watch as the truth unravels.

For laugh-out-loud comedy, you can’t beat Stella Gibbons’s effortless skewering of the earnest literary pretensions of melodramatic twentieth-century novelists. Can briskly efficient socialite Flora Poste sort out her hopeless family relations, moldering away in the country at Cold Comfort Farm?

Often shelved as YA, Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea novels trace the life of Ged, from a young magician-in-training to an old man. All are wonderful, but as a teen, it was ATUAN, with its imperious, courageous heroine, the child-priestess Tenar, that spoke to me.

Agatha Christie might be the most famous mystery writer in the world, with a massive fan base and lasting legacy. Her family has given author Sophie Hannah full support to release a new story of Christie's famous character, Poirot. AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, Christie’s most popular work, is a now classic mystery and the perfect introduction to the author’s books.

The quartet of Claudine novels follows the coming-of-age of a girl not unlike Colette herself, growing up in rural France and eventually moving to Paris as a young wife. Rich, sensuous, and full of an almost unbearable nostalgia, they are wonderfully escapist reading.

If your favorite character is Jonathan Byers

The misunderstood, unhappy kid who yearns for an East Coast college where he can forget his modest upbringing and meet sufficiently interesting friends? Sounds like Richard Papen, the narrator of Donna Tartt’s first novel, THE SECRET HISTORY.

Josephine Tey’s THE DAUGHTER OF TIME is justly celebrated, but this story of Brat Farrar, an imposter come to cheat an unassuming family out of their inheritance, deserves to be better known. As with her other novels, this is crisp, intelligent, and beautifully plotted crime.

Stuart’s Fictional Dinner Party Guests: Elena and Lila

I’d like to host a dinner with an eye on close friendships. Friendships are fascinating because they are the one relationship in life that you aren’t required to be in because of birth or bound to by law. Those in attendance would ideally have a multiple-decade friendship like Elena and Lila of MY BRILLIANT FRIEND. And even though he’s not fictional, I’d love for my best friend to be sitting at the table, too.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle"--and the heart of the reader--in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments.

One of my desert island books, THE LEOPARD is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing. Simply beautifully written (and translated), this is a book everyone should read.