Barry Lyndon

William Makepeace Thackeray's Barry Lyndon is much more audacious, interesting and mendacious than the version that appears in Stanley Kubrick's film. The ultimate unreliable narrator, Redmond Barry (his birth name) is always ready to draw his sword (or shoot off his mouth) to defend his supposed honor. The likable rogue reaches its apotheosis in this excellent novel. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Had it not been for the popular stage production of this Mark Haddon novel, which I kept hearing about but have never seen, it's likely I would not have picked this up in a Salzburg shop (in a slight panic that I would run out of books before the end of a vacation). It is a diverting read, and useful in explaining to the ignorant (me) the characteristics of Asperger's. The mystery of the title is fairly transparent.

Black Robe

Brian Moore's Black Robe is a harrowing and unblinking treatment of the intersection of indigenous people and French missionaries. Superstition and carnality are given full rein in what is both a philosophical exploration and a taut adventure story.

Ma'am Darling

Craig Brown's account of the life of Princess Margaret is compulsively readable. The format of vignettes, public statements, even invented alternate histories, is brilliant. The woman who was so (justly) detested becomes in the end, miraculously, an object of no small amount of pity.

The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

Anatole France's first novel, published in 1881, traces the intersection of a bookish, moral man with a young woman in trouble. With deep understanding of human nature and luminous prose, France thus begins a literary journey that would conclude with the Nobel Prize in 1921. The "crime" of the titular Bonnard is an example of France's irony par excellence.