Asking a bookworm to choose a favourite book is very much like asking a parent to choose a favourite child, or so they say! However, 26 books – that’s entirely possible, so just for fun (and to try and chase away some of those Monday blues), I turned my attention to a list of my must-reads from A-Z. The only letter I struggled with was X (no prizes for guessing here), and some letters like L, P, W, S, M and T were unfairly over-represented, which made picking a book from those letters a little more difficult.

The books are a mix of fiction and non-fiction, and I’d love to hear which titles you’d add, or remove…also if you have any ideas for ‘X’, do send them my way.

• A – A Little Life (Hanya Yanagihara)
• B – Being Mortal (Atul Gawande)
• C – The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
• D – Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak)
• E – East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
• F – A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
• G – Guns, Germs and Steel (Jared Diamond)
• H – The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende)
• I – Into the Wild (Jon Krakauer)
• J – Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
• K – Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami)
• L – The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R Tolkien)
• M – My Brilliant Friend (Elena Ferrante)
• N – North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell)
• O – One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
• P – Pride & Prejudice (Jane Austen)
• Q – Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Speaking (Susan Cain)
• R – Reasons to Stay Alive (Matt Haig)
• S – A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth)
• T – Thank You For Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations (Thomas L. Friedman)
• U – The Undoing Project (Michael Lewis)
• V – Voices from Chernobyl (Svetlana Alexievich)
• W – When Breath Becomes Air (Paul Kalanithi)
• X – ??
• Y – The Year of the Runaways (Sanjeev Sahota)
• Z – The Zanzibar Chest (Aidan Hartley)