Teju Cole is a writer, art historian and street photographer. Born in the US in 1975 to Nigerian parents, he was raised in Nigeria and now lives in Brooklyn. He is the author of two books: a novella, Every Day is for the Thief, and a novel, Open City, which tells the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist in New York five years after 9/11.

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"It all began with Crusoe. But it intensified in our time: this is the age of loneliness. The canonical texts are Notes from the Underground, Hunger, L'Etranger, and The Catcher in the Rye. Other presiding spirits are those of Kafka and Beckett. But in my own reading, I'm drawn not only to extreme isolation but to apparently well-integrated individuals who, nevertheless, spend most of their time in their own thoughts. Many of these novels are narrated in the first person, but I hadn't noticed before how many of them are by anonymous narrators, unaccompanied even by their names. Julius, in Open City, is named, but what he shares with all the protagonists below is a shifting, and shifty, relationship with his author. In writing him, I invented situations, attitudes, beliefs and actions, but a great deal of his solitude came out of mine."

1. The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald

A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears.

2. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar

Yourcenar's marvellous account of the life and mind of the Emperor Hadrian is a flawless historical fiction. Hadrian, as depicted here, is a lonely and sensual philhellene; an introvert and philosopher who, for the sake of Rome, had to be a public man. It is the story of a philosopher-king's struggle to understand himself, but such is Yourcenar's skill that we absorb, along the way, both the flickering memories in Hadrian's mind as well as a lot of information about ancient Rome.

3. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Ellison's sharp, loquacious narrator lives in an overlit basement apartment, and stalks the streets of New York. He is subject to disregard and petty humiliation, not because he is insubstantial but because he is black. A great deal has changed in the city since this book was awarded the National Book Award in 1953, but young African-American men still go about disregarded. This book held an unflattering mirror up to American society; American society applauded, and looked away.

4. The Enigma of Arrival by VS Naipaul

I read and reread it for the sentences: their impeccable rhythm, the sensibility of witness behind them. It feels as though each tree, each hedge, each leaf of Naipaul's Wiltshire valley were as closely and ecstatically attended as the objects in an early Flemish painting. A finely modulated portrait of a man caught helplessly in the flux of time, and aware of his helplessness. In public utterance, Naipaul likes to outrage, but on the page, no one is subtler or more patient.

No, not technically a novel, but Davis's strange and often very short short stories are novels in miniature. They are usually narrated by a slippery, sceptical, ironical self, written in the first, second, or third person. This self, who is married, and has a life very like Davis's own, tussles with language, isolation, memory, and the absurdities of the everyday. Grimly funny and, on the level of craft, inspiring.

6. The Plains by Gerald Murnane

One of the strangest novels I've ever read. Murnane's narrator is a film-maker who, in slow, hypnotic, maddening, recursive prose, recounts his efforts to make a film about the outback. It's a story devoid of "events or achievements". The real plains are the folds of the brain, which contain the elusive matter of memory. Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett. All his books are about hesitation and isolation; he himself rarely leaves home, and has never been out of Australia.

7. English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee

Agastya Sen, a child of privilege, passes his exams and is posted to dusty Madna to work in the Indian civil service. It's a prestigious posting, but all he wants to do is smoke weed in his room, read Marcus Aurelius, and listen to Keith Jarrett. On the occasions when he has to interact with others, he tells outrageous lies. Chatterjee deploys the material with impeccable timing. There are many great Indian books in English: this is my favourite.

8. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household

This slim volume is the daddy of English spy novels. A big-game hunter decides, on a lark, to get the president of a central European country in his gun sights. He does, but he's caught, stripped, tortured, and left for dead, and he must slip out of the country unnoticed. We are with him all the hair-raising way. It is genre, certainly, but it is far better-written than most "literary" fictions.

9. The Master by Colm Tóibín

Tóibín's novel about Henry James has been justly praised for its elegance and tonal control. It tells a convincing story of a man whose main interest in life is to raid it as material for art. Tóibín tells the story in sentences no less beautiful than James's, but, thank God, far less tortured.

10. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro's evocation of a psychologically neutered butler continues to impress. Stevens's hollow rectitude and meticulous self-deception are related in the first person, and for the duration of the book, the reader inhabits his psyche fully. The books Ishiguro wrote before and after, fine as they are, appear to circle around this one.