The Diving-Bell & the Butterfly is the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the 42-year old editor-in-chief of Elle magazine in Paris, who, out of the blue, suffered a massive stroke and slipped into a coma.  When he finally came to three weeks later, he was completely alert mentally and yet at the same time paralysed, speechless and only able to move one muscle: his left eyelid.  But this was also his saving grace: through this fragile escape route and the practised art of blinking at an alphabet board, he was able to dictate this astonishing book, letter by letter.  Simply knowing that fact and understanding how precious language is, when self expression is so severely under threat, gives this book an incredibly powerful aura. 

Bauby doesn't flinch from the absurdist horror of his situation, but rather laces his writing with delicious, dry and dark humour at both his fate and the wildly varying attitudes of those around him, from those he knows well, to the most perceptive - and the most doltish - of the nursing staff at his remote seaside hospital.  It recounts the author's tenderness for his family and friends, as well as a profound sensual longing for the pleasures he will never know again. 

Far from being a depressing read, 'The Diving-Bell & the Butterfly' is one of the most intense testaments to the beauty of life I have ever read, as remembered and truly considered by a man who has stepped outside of life in order to look back at it for all of us.

This tiny volume (my copy has only 139 pages) has now been made into a film.  At the time of writing this, the release date has yet to be set, although it may soon be playing at cinema near you.  Without seeing it, I cannot even begin to imagine how a film has been made from it and worry that the intense treasure at the heart of this book will have been lost in its translation.  If you are thinking of going to see it, then I urge you to read this very special book first…

For fans of crime fiction, James Ellroy is one of the all-time giants: an author of dark and dazzling works such as American Tabloid, LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia.  But Ellroy also has his own very personal experience of crime: when he was a 10-year old child, his mother was murdered whilst on a night out with an unknown man.  The murderer was never caught. 

Suddenly, well into his writing career, Ellroy's attention starts to return obsessively to the crime, the defining moment of his life, and he decides to re-open the murder investigation with the help of an LAPD homicide cop - and then write about the experience. 

From this frighteningly intelligent man, as unflinchingly honest as you will ever read, comes this extraordinary book, showing how the damaged and alienated child, his head filled with antipathy towards his mother (planted by his estranged and hate-filled father), goes on to lead a highly unstable and insalubrious life filled with alcohol, drugs, theft, voyeurism and general dereliction, before discovering his writing skills and 'coming good'. 

Ellroy employs veteran detective Bill Stoner to work with him to try to solve the 38-year-old crime, but the core of the book is not a murder mystery, rather the incredibly slow-burning and touching story of a hardened man finding his way back to his mother and to the child whose heart had closed down so many years before.

I first read this novel in my teens and I still read it with the same overwhelming sense of astonishment and recognition.  I firmly believe it is the finest novel ever written in the English language.  I grew up on the edge of the Yorkshire dales and moorlands and my grandparents came from real Brontë territory: Haworth, Cononley, Keighley.  My great-grandmother even attended Spelling Bees at Haworth as a child, run by the Brontë sisters. The novel represents my most deeply-loved landscape: doomy, beautiful, unforgiving and utterly wild at heart -  yet somehow captured in book form. 

Wuthering Heights is peopled with figures pulled out of stormy nights and howling winds and the harsh sod of the moors, like elements made flesh; characters not quite civilised or betraying only a thin veneer of civilisation, observed with fascination and incredulity by the narrator, representing for us the good, civilised folk of the city.  It is one of the most passionate and also one of the sexiest books ever - 'hewn in a wild workshop', according to Emily's sister Charlotte - and Heathcliff remains one of the great sex symbols of English fiction: a figure from the subconscious; the fiery, wilful id, for whom nothing will ever quench his desire, but the love of his Catherine.

Rian Malan is the direct descendant of one of the most detested 'great' families of South Africa's Afrikaner past, of the very architect of the apartheid system: a loaded beginning for a dope-smoking, liberal-minded journalist still living under that régime and intent on examining his family's impact on it.  I first read an excerpt of this book in the Sunday Times and was stunned by its incisive tone and the utterly revelatory writing about identity and race. I rushed out to buy the book and not a word disappoints.

This is a searingly honest book, which once again represents a journey, although this time with a downward trajectory, from a pure idealism to a harsh and compromised reality. Salman Rushdie said of it that 'Here, as in nothing I've read before, is the demotic voice of black and Afrikaner South Africa.'  Malan examines racism's fear and hatred, hatred and fear, discovering endless mysteries and misinterpretations along the way, but always in his own enquiring and penetrating voice.  'What would you have me say?  That I think apartheid is stupid and vicious?  I do. That I'm sorry?  I am, I am.....You would probably have believed me. I almost believed myself, you see, but in truth I was always one of them.  I am a white man born in Africa, and all else flows from there.'  Along with JM Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K', this is one of the greatest books ever written about the former South African régime and about the complexity of Africa itself.

Ever wondered what the Rolling Stones' 'Sympathy for the devil' was actually about?  It turns out it was written as a paean to this book, given to Mick Jagger by Marianne Faithful and chronicling the events that follow the personal appearance of the devil in Moscow.  Bulgakov's 1938 masterpiece is as strange as Alice in Wonderland, though frankly miles more entertaining.

Surreal, elegant, wickedly satirical, wildly funny and more than a little bit plain mad, the novel plays out the visit of the devil and his retinue (who include a naked girl, two demons and a supersized black cat, who walks on his hind legs, talks, smokes cigars and is prone to using a Mauser automatic) and their effect on everyone around them as society falls prey to his pranks; everyone that is apart from the Master and his beloved Margarita, whose mixture of truth-seeking and love enable a kind of survival over the reign of terror.  By 1938 Bulgakov was worn down by the suppression of his work under Stalin, who had personally phoned him to tell him he was not allowed to emigrate but must stay in the Soviet Union.  Something of the hysteria that this must have engendered permeates this book. Just as Emily Brontë died a year after giving the world her singular masterpiece, so Bulgakov went blind the year after completing The Master and Margarita.  He died one year later.