The Imitation of the Rose by Clarice Lispector (Penguin) — one of the most disturbing and most formally perfect short stories of the twentieth century, in which a woman’s too-perfectly-ordered house reveals a mind at the edge of breakdown. This Penguin Little Black Classic gathers it alongside other essential Lispector works — a concentrated introduction to a writer who uses ordinary surfaces to reveal extraordinary inner states. Published by Penguin.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Penguin Modern Classics) — the dark academia novel that defined a genre, in which a group of Greek scholars murder one of their own and the narrator, who knows everything from the first page, spends six hundred pages explaining how intelligent, cultivated young people came to believe that murder was not only possible but necessary. One of the great American novels of the last thirty years. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Penguin Modern Classics) — a larger, fresh edition of Dostoevsky’s most delicate work: the novella of four conversations on a St Petersburg bridge between a lonely young man and Nastenka, a young woman waiting for someone else. Literature’s most precise account of romantic longing in a hundred pages, with an introduction situating it in Dostoevsky’s early development. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (Picador) — a novel of extraordinary atmospheric power set in seventeenth-century northern Norway, where a Scottish witch-hunter, a survivor of a devastating storm, and the hunter’s wife are drawn into a triangle of desire, power, and accusation. Renders the Arctic darkness and cold with physical precision — a deeply moving, beautifully written historical novel. Published by Picador.

Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector (Penguin Modern Classics) — over five hundred weekly columns, written for the Jornal do Brasil between 1960 and 1985, gathered in their first complete English translation. The most intimate access to Lispector’s mind available anywhere — thinking aloud about cooking, children, God, writing, and the precise texture of a particular morning’s light. Essential. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (Penguin Modern Classics) — one of the great American novellas, a portrait of the elusive Holly Golightly in prose as polished and precise as anything Capote wrote. Includes three further stories — ‘House of Flowers’, ‘A Diamond Guitar’, and ‘A Christmas Memory’ — making this the ideal introduction to Capote’s short fiction at its most accomplished. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.