It’s always been fiction or poetry for me, never non-fiction. At the top of my list of the half-dozen or so works that I return to time and time again is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. I read it when I was about 19 or 20, and I’ve probably read it again every year since. It’s an immortal story, one that yields new meanings every time you return to it.
Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is another of the classics that has lived with me, as has Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and Maria Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. One of the joys of being a publisher is that you’re always within reach of a book, but these are the ones that I keep going back to. These, and the poetry of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas: they never go out of style.