Books Recommended by Christopher Hitchens
Daughter of Fortune
Isabel Allende
Source: "The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Source: "A service to the history it depicts, and puts the author in the very first rank of historical novelists." - Christopher Hitchens
Coming Up for Air
George Orwell
Source: "In these pages, I found some specimens of exactly the lower-middle-class family that was familiar to me from life." - Christopher Hitchens
The Ship
C. S. Forester
Source: "The odds in tonnage and gunnery are adjusted in favour of the British side by sheer discipline, pluck and morale." - Christopher Hitchens
The Cruel Sea
Nicholas Monsarrat
Source: "[I read this book] about 50 times before I was 15." - Christopher Hitchens
A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell
Source: "When you read [this book], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
Evelyn Waugh
Source: "When you read [this trilogy], you will straightaway notice that the veterans of the first world war are the instructors of the novices of the second world war." - Christopher Hitchens
Bitter Lemons
Lawrence Durrell
Source: "[The author's] beautiful but patronizing memoir." - Christopher Hitchens
Borges
Edwin Williamson
Source: "[This] biography reaches the heart of the labyrinth—the intense and wondrous life of Jorge Luis Borges." - Christopher Hitchens
Scenes of Clerical Life
George Eliot
Source: "The gold standard." - Christopher Hitchens
Complete Poems by Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen
Source: "I think [people] should read [this author]. In particular they should read 'Dulce et Decorum Est.' The poem that first arrested me." - Christopher Hitchens
The Fall of Berlin 1945
Antony Beevor
Source: "[The author's] heart-freezing account [...] of the rape and murder and humiliation that fell on Germans in the territory taken by the Soviet army in 1945." - Christopher Hitchens
The Silent Angel
Heinrich Böll
Source: "Unflinchingly discusses the ruins and the corpses." - Christopher Hitchens
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann
Source: "The narrator of [this book] is relating his story against the clock, as the German homeland finds itself pulverized and encircled in the spring of 1945." - Christopher Hitchens
The Gulag Archipelago
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Source: "Once [the author] succeeded in getting [this book print], it became obvious that something terminal had happened to the edifice of Soviet power." - Christopher Hitchens
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Source: "[The author's] electrifying first book." - Christopher Hitchens
Portrait in Sepia
Isabel Allende
Source: "The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
Source: "The 'subject' is assuredly family life, which is also the tempestuous subtext of much of [the author]'s nonfiction." - Christopher Hitchens
The Captive Mind
Czeslaw Milosz
Source: "I was very struck by the courtesy and grace of this famous polemic and by the way that [the author] combined firmness on his own part with an understanding of the position of others." - Christopher Hitchens
Hons and Rebels
Jessica Mitford
Source: "These pages describe the steady, determined evolution of une femme serieuse." - Christopher Hitchens
