David Nicholls

I absolutely love Helen Garner's writing.

I think she's one of my favorite living writers.

She's written very few novels, but I really love them all, and I think this is my favorite.

The Children's Bach, again, is about a family, a very tight unit of four, who seem to be living a very comfortable, bohemian life in 70s Melbourne, and this life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of a figure from the past.

The writing in this book, the prose, is just beautiful.

It's both very, very simple and deeply poetic, and every sentence is just right.

And again, it's a book that I find very, very moving.

It's brilliant on family.

It's brilliant on the fragility of family life, on music, on the dangers of a kind of world bohemian lifestyle.

It's absolutely of its time and place, but it's full of timeless observations about parenthood and family.

And if you haven't read Helen Garner, then please do.

I think she's an extraordinary writer.

There's a huge amount of fantastic nonfiction, but her novels and novellas are absolutely wonderful.

For my third book, I thought I would choose a classic.

And I suppose the first great writer that I loved was Charles Dickens.

I read Great Expectations when I was about 16, and that had a massive effect on me.

But the one I really admire, the one I love the most, is Bleak House, which is a huge thousand-page monster, but incredibly entertaining.

The title makes it sound rather gloomy, but it has wonderful, wonderful comedy in it,

But it's comedy that's shot through with real anger, a real sense of injustice at the inequality of life at that time.

The plot is beautifully worked out.