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?

Nancy Mitford to complément the Waugh?
All other suggestions already made.
How about some literary biography?

Lurking on this thread for inspiration but I love your username @BarnacleBeasley 😁

Can't go wrong with any collection by Louise Glück, such beautiful, timeless, thought provoking poetry.

Ooh, yes. The Help.

I'm late to the thread and you are probably sorted by now OP but I highly recommend Penelope Lively.

Moon Tiger won the Booker prize in 1987 I think, I read it recently and it is a fantastic novel.

Some lesser-known or recently rediscovered classics:

The Inseparables, Simone de Beauvoir
The Snowball, Brigid Brophy
The Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning
The Country Girls trilogy, Edna O’Brien

I read too many men at her age, wish I’d read more women sooner!

Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey by Homer.

I wish I could buy her practically all of these!

Lovely list. You can read them yourself and pass them on over the years. What a wonderful way to bond.

How about some play anthologies?

Shaw, Checkov, Ibsen, Brecht, Strindberg, Pirandello and others of that era?

Or later 20th century British playwrights Bond, Churchill, Wertenbaker, Pinter, Edgar, Orton etc

The British playwrights may be on her curriculum already but maybe not the European.

Or some more of the more popular playwrights of their day Priestley, Rattigan, Pinero, Coward etc.

I loved reading those when doing my degree as they gave me some cultural history and context and were a quick read.

I would recommend anything by Olga Tokarczuk