I’ve always found that my favourite writers give the best book recommendations. It was David Foster Wallace who got me on to Don De Lillo. It was Flan O’Connor who recommended Faulkner. Dostoyevsky introduced me to Gogol, Houellebecq to Céline. Discovering the literary lineage of my favourite writers is a way to better understand how they got to where they are, and where it is that they’re are going.

I have been relatively obsessed over the last couple of years by the first three volumes of My Struggle, the epic “memoir” by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård. It is a hyper-revelatory chronicle of Knausgård’s life, from childhood to fatherhood, from awkward teenager to nationally famous author. Mixed in with meditations on time and art and love it describes—often in excruciating detail—the mundane events of Karl Ove’s life; trips to the supermarket, changing nappies, quiet cigarettes on balconies.