Louis Nowra is an award-winning author and playwright who lives in Sydney with his wife, the writer Mandy Sayer, and their dogs, Coco and Basil. His second novel for young adults, Prince of Afghanistan, looks at how a young soldier handles war and danger, and how much a man can depend on his dog.
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Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
I had read very few novels when, at the age of 17, I came upon a cheap paperback of Lolita. It's the story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged literature professor from Europe becoming obsessed, and sexually involved with Lolita, his 12-year-old American step-daughter. Its humour and linguistic playfulness seduced me, as did its hilarious portrait of 1950s America. The gorgeous prose entranced me with its uncommon mixture of the baroque and the vernacular. Lolita taught me how to read and write.
Wisconsin Death Trip
Michael Lesy
This portrait of the small Wisconsin town of Black River Falls, under the impact of the depression of the 1890s, still spooks me. The book juxtaposes the photographs of local photographer Charles Van Schiak with contemporary newspaper reports of suicides, killings, madness and general mayhem. It's a history that verges on the Gothic but is also an unnerving depiction of how a community can suffer a collective nervous breakdown. I stole its structure for my book The Cheated.
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West
This ferocious and darkly comic novel is set in Los Angeles during the 1930s and centres on Tod Hackett, a painter working in a minor job in the movies. There are no famous people, just bit-players, failed starlets, alcoholic dwarfs and washed-up vaudeville artists whose lives are a distorted vision of the American dream of fame and celebrity. The ending is unforgettable and West's lurid, almost surreal imagery, is an extraordinary evocation of the tawdry underbelly of Hollywood.
Life: A User's Manual
Georges Perec
Perec's 20th-century masterpiece is based around a single moment, 8pm on June 23, 1975. It's an encyclopedic novel set in a Parisian apartment block whose every room has a story, which prove to be funny, moving or strange. Based on an elaborate infrastructure, this is a staggering achievement of the imagination and storytelling. Whenever I re-read it I am always reluctant to finish it because I never want it to end.
