Saved from the Waves

Michael Lawrence rescues his top five books

By Michael Lawrence

A Death in a Family by James Agee

In the opening pages of his only novel Agee renders a most everyday situation - men hosing their lawns at dusk - in prose of the most exquisite beauty and precision. From this point on, Agee's account of a perfectly ordinary family tragedy, told from the family members' various perspectives during the hours before and after the event, unfolds with masterful authority. The children of the family, attempting to grasp the situation, are among the most tenderly and accurately rendered in fiction.

The Professor's House by Willa Cather

A peculiar and haunting novel, Cather's finest, startlingly radical in form. A quietly devestating study of an old professor's belated realisation of what and who mattered most in his life. One of the finest American novels ever written.

The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James

The most bittersweet of James' comic novels, The Spoils of Poynton concerns a mother's desperate attempts to prevent her exquisite posessions - the spoils of the title - from falling into the hands of her son's fiancee's philistine family, and a young woman's entanglement in her plans. Contains the most melodramatic appearance of a biscuit in fiction.

Collected Poems by Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore's marvellous menageries, her portraits of jellyfish, wood-weasels and pangolins, remain among the most charming and disarmingly complex poems of the twentieth century.

At Swim Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill

Along with William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf, one of the most beautiful fictional portraits of the bonds between young men. Set in the years immediately preceding the Easter Rebellion. At Swim Two Boys is a historical romance of the rarest kind; imagine Brokeback Mountain meets The Wind that Shakes the Barley. This novel contains the most evocative descriptions of the thrill of swimming, and of the pain and confusion of longing, that I have ever read.