When serious writers relax, they’re always in the mood for a romance

In a new book, 125 leading authors list their favourite reads. Time and again, they choose good, old-fashioned love stories

Have you ever wondered what books your favourite author would choose as their favourites? Well, here is your chance to find out.

Leading writers from Britain, America and Australia have been asked to list their top ten works of literature, and the results will be published in a book next month.

The top-rated work was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. His other great epic, War and Peace, came third. Two other Russians also made the top ten. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita came fourth and the stories of Anton Chekov ninth.

Sven Birkerts, a lecturer at Harvard University and one of the book’s contributors, said: “One thing that stands out so clearly in the list of top choices is the outsized vividness of the characters. . . They are our representatives in the world of life imagined — Prince Andrei and Natasha, Pierre, Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty, Tom and Huck, Emma, Gatsby and Daisy, Hamlet, Ophelia, Humbert Humbert and Lolita, Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon. Even to name them is to recall their compact human resonance. To read their lives is to be forced to reconsider our own.”

He said that he was surprised that classics such as Joyce’s Ulyssesdid not make the overall top ten. “There is no disputing tastes,” he said. “But there is also no disputing that collective preferences exist. The collective preference reflected in the list of greats is clearly for memorable character-driven dramas of love and death delineated in sensuous nuanced prose.” The Top Ten is published by W W Norton on March 1, price £9.99.

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