I need a book for clever well read 23 year old dil.

[CurlewKate]

She’s doing an English degree and she’s loved some of the books I’ve given her- I try to choose old fashioned sort of classics-she loved Muriel Spark, Graham Green and Evelyn Waugh, for example and A Month in the Country. She didn’t like Kingsley Amis or Barbara Pym. Any ideas?

@Nandina , I don't like being given books as gifts either. I feel obliged to read them, and find them a chore. I rarely enjoy them.

I was going to suggest Lady Audley’s Secret!

The Bloody Chamber, a collection of stories by Angela Carter. Wolf Alice got their name inspiration from it.

It's non-fiction I'm afraid (I like Jane Austen best, but I expect she's read all of those) - but I very much enjoyed "Unruly" by David Mitchell. About early English rulers, written with great intelligence and wit.

I can also highly recommend "The People on Platform 5" by Clare Pooley in the way of fiction.

These are all novels I read 30 years ago in my early 20s and loved:
Margaret Drabble - The Millstone
Fay Weldon - Growing Rich
Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale
Lesley Glaister - The Private Parts of Women
Alice Hoffman - Practical Magic

I second Rebecca and The Woman in White.
The Moonstone.
Portrait of a Lady
Cranford
Bliss and other stories Katherine Mansfield
Small Things Like These Claire Keegan
The Marriage Portrait Maggie O Farrell
The Age of Innocence
Remains of the Day
My Cousin Rachel

Stoner by John Williams. Just beautifully written.

The Crimson Petal and The White.

Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth.

Good point Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge” would fall into this (kind of) short stories remit.

I went left field and got him the first of Mary Renault’s Alexander books! He was glued to it all Christmas….

Change of Climate is horrific! The Cazalets are children’s stories pretending to be adult fiction- not necessarily a criticism, btw.

Another vote for Marilynn Robinson but I prefer the Gilead novels to Housekeeping, but all magnificent. Alice Munro’s short stories. William Trevor The Silence in the Garden was a revelation to me, but it might help to know some history of the English in Ireland and to have read some other colonial tragedies- Camus, for example. VSNaipal’s collection from the seventies, In. A Free State is great - Tell Me Who To Kill will break her heart!

Georgette Heyer?

I find her enjoyable and entertaining.

I'm not sure she's been mentioned yet but I have read a lot of the classics and literary authors already listed and it might be a bit off-piste but I've recently really enjoyed reading Celia Fremlin, she's sometimes billed as the British Patricia Highsmith and has some short stories and novels. She's quite something.

Romantic Outlaws - the story of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley.

@drspouse Oh I read that and it was really good!

The diary of a Provincial Lady.

Anna Karenina, Father and son, Doctor Zhivago. I really like Russian literature. She may like War and Peace but you need to concentrate because all the characters have more than one name.

Anything from John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath, Easy of Eden. They made me question so much. Anything by Robert Louis Stevenson.

I listened to it on audio book. Don't have enough time to read such long books but it was fascinating and unless it's one of her set books it would be great for someone who loves literature but has read most primary texts.

As a pp mentioned, short stories. I'm a PhD student specialising in the early twentieth century short story and many of the writers lauded for their longer-form fiction were also short story stylists, able to put this tricky genre to powerful use. Edith Wharton, Muriel Spark, Ray Bradbury, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shirley Jackson, and Elizabeth Bowen all wrote compelling short stories. Katherine Mansfield and Anton Chekhov's prose fiction output was almost all short stories. Many short fiction writers had a flair for the uncanny and uneasy; M.R. James and E.F. Benson made a specialism out of ghost stories, while F. Scott Fitzgerald subsidised his novel-writing with scarily effective short stories for magazines, like 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair.' Shirley Jackson's 'The Lottery' got her hate-mail when it was published in The New Yorker in 1948. Surprising things come in small packages.

What great recommendations @Tortielady !

Thank you @drspouse

Love Shirley Jackson. Very much underrated.

For short stories, Grace Paley's are fabulous.

After Leaving Mr Mckenzie by Jean Rhys.