The most under-rated books you have read - recommendations please

Wonderful tingle in the spine when evenkeel recommends what I was going to - Betty Macdonald. Also i remember 'paddle to the river' as well marytuda, had completely forgotten it for years though! ds would love it I think.

Midnight's children by salman rushdie- controversial figure but a lovely fiction about children all born at the midnight hour.
plus have to seriously recommend christopher brookmyre as the sickest funny crime writer I have on our bookshelf (a scottish carl hiaasen if that means anything to anyone)

gone blank now... it's ages since i read a book apart from "what to expect in the first year"!!

Evenkeel, thank you for reminding me about Betty MacDonald! I remember finding her books laugh out loud funny as a teenager (am now in my 40s).

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield,
Snow by Max Fermine,
The Toucan Feather by N. Stafford-Deitsch
Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

... enjoy!

Teenage DD and I read, out load to each other, "The Evil Seed" by Joanne Harris, late nights on hols. Good spooky stuff.

Wow some wonderful books have been mentioned here - and huge numbers added to my 'wishlist'.

I love most of the books I've encountered by Marge Piercy. She's kind of like a cross between John Irving (think marvellous rich characters) and Margaret Atwood.

Also, the Bone People by Keri Hulme is awesome.

Has anyone read 'Lila Says'? It's anonymous and French and I loved it when I first read it. Must dig it out again.

Also I might be the only person who hadn't heard of 'Fugitive Pieces' by Anne Michaels but I suspect I'm not and it is an amazing novel.

In 1968 my family moved from deepest rural England to Berkeley California - for just one year. I think it was the culture shock that turned me into a compulsive reader - that and some lovely American kids' books. As well as classics like Laura I Wilder, I encountered: All of a Kind Family (about a poorish Jewish family of girls in New York); The Little Witch Girl, and a lovely picture book called Paddle to the Sea. Where are they now? Probably out of print. I was nine.

Might get this going again.....worth a try! I just remembered a book I used to love and haven't read for years - 'In This House of Brede' by Rumer Godden. It's about a businesswoman who enters a convent - sounds unlikely, I know, but it's a great book. Actually, all her books are well worth reading, not just 'Black Narcissus' which is probably her best-known now, I suppose, because of the film.

Oh, and something else I love is Betty MacDonald's books - 'The Plague and I' and 'The Egg and I' (there are a couple more, too). Not fiction, as they're based on her own life, but they're hilarious. The sort of book you go back to and curl up with contentedly on the sofa on a horrible winter afternoon.....must dig them out again!

"The Missing Extra" by Jacky Rom is a cross between a detective story and the glamourous world of fame and fortune. It tells the story of a young girl with a very pushy backstage mother who lands her first movie role and solves a mystery whilst on set. The book is fast paced and funny. This is the first in a series of 5 books the 2nd of which has just been published called "The Lost Script" Both books are worth a read my girls loved them, aimed at children age 8 - 12.

otchayaniye - yy to Dorothy L Sayers (obviously ). And Josephine Tey.

Does anyone read John Wyndham anymore? And has anyone heard of the Rabbi Small detective novels?

I was lent a collection of Damon Runyon when I was ill at university and it made me feel better almost at once. And I have just had the pleasure of reading Saki to DS1 and think I have converted him.

I picked up Wallace Stegner's "Crossing to Safety" at a yard sale a few years ago and have reread it several times since.

Don't know if he was over- or under-rated in his time, but I had never heard of him.

Bit late coming to this but I too have read 'I'll Go to Bed at Noon' and loved it. As I did the whole trilogy. A friend was reading it and I asked her what it was like - she said 'oh, not very interesting, really'. Then I read it and was that she could think that. Beautifully written.

Anything by Robertson Davies. Just 'cos he's Canadian doesn't mean he isn't worth it!

i LOVE skallagrigg! and no-one else has ever heard of it :(

anything by erich segal (author of love story). i think he is actually out of print in the UK but he is marvellous, i want everybody to read him (yes fish if you can tear your peepers away from twitter this means you )

A vote for Skallagrig by William Horwood of Duncton Wood fame. Not about animals this time and very different from anything else he's written. I defy anybody not to read the first few chapters and not be moved to tears.

I agree with whoever mentioned Barbara Comyns, and also Naipaul, House for Mr Biswas is wonderful, also The Suffrage of Elvira.

Pamela Hansford Johnson has written some interesting novels, ( she was married to C.P Snow - does anyone read him nowadays? I know my parents really rated him)

I also enjoyed Colette's Claudine stories when I was younger, again she is probably out of fashion now.

I think I have all of those Otchayaniye - you have good taste! A Man of the People, by Achebe, is also brilliant.

There's a good sequel (well, not strictly a sequel) to 'The Man who Ate Everything', called 'It Must've Been Something I Ate'.

There's a wonderful Lermontov (he was descended from Scots, called Learmont) poem called 'In a Valley in Daghestan I Lay ...' (apols translation) where it presages his death in a duel. Quite spooky.

Stuff that's 50 year's old? Erm, perhaps Master & Magherita, White Guard (if you like Russian lit), Bely's 'Petersburg'

Another lesser known Burgess novel (I had the pleasure of meeting him and being invited to his house) is 'The Long Day Wanes - semi autobiographical set in post-war Malaysia

A House for Mr Biswas by Naipaul (ok, not underrated)

Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Kobo Abe's Woman of the Dunes

I'm a massive Saki fan too. Seek out Beachcomber.

I like this thread, but it's a bit hard to say that Gogol and Nabokov are underrated! Love them. One day last year ds1 said, apropos of nothing, 'mummy, imagine if a man woke up one day and found for no reason that his nose had disappeared'. He regretted it when I went off on one about a whole literary canon!!

I particularly love 'A Hero of Our Time' by Lermontov, at least partly because he managed to be so fabulous before dying in a duel when he was about 23.

Talking of classics - I'm really up for recommendations for things more than however many - 50? - years old that you can get for free from ibooks. Off to look for Saki now...

"A Lost Lady" by Willa Cather: just fabulous, read it recently and can't believe not better known.