Best Books... DJ Taylor

THE MIDNIGHT BELL by Patrick Hamilton (Vintage £8.99)
The first part of Hamilton's London trilogy, Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, named after the Euston Road pub in which it is set. A cornucopia of swift halves, solitary drinking, endless pubchat and literary-minded barman Bob's vain pursuit of Jenny, the conniving prostitute.

THE GREEN HAT by Michael Arlen (Capuchin Classics £7.99)
Twenties Mayfair in all its bright inconsequentiality, and featuring the decade's most celebrated heroine, man-eating Iris Storm, described as a mixture of "a pagan body and a Chislehurst mind", whose husband throws himself out of a hotel window on their honeymoon "for purity".

THE RECTOR'S DAUGHTER by F.M. Mayor (Penguin £7.99)
A devastating story of unrequited love. Mary Jocelyn, whose admirer marries someone else, is an unlikely heroine, but the story of her disappointment is one of the great lost classics of the inter-war years.

RICEYMAN STEPS by Arnold Bennett (Dodo Press £12.99)
Life in shabby, genteel Clerkenwell just after the Great War, starring Mr Earlforward, second-hand bookshop proprietor and miser, whose marriage - to a woman after his own heart - sows the seeds of his doom.

DECLINE AND FALL by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin £7.99)
Ingenu Paul Pennyfeather, sent down from Oxford and reduced to teaching in a bizarre Welsh prep school, looks set to marry the glamorous Mrs Beste-Chetwynde, until fate takes a hand. Waugh never did anything funnier than this satirical picaresque.

AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY by Theodore Dreiser (Signet £8.99)
Dreiser's masterpiece - the demise of a preacher's son who travels to New York State, gets a job in his uncle's factory, seduces a working girl, falls for an heiress and, in trying to square this circle, commits a murder that will send him to the electric chair.

DJ Taylor's latest novel, Ask Alice, has just been published by Chatto & Windus at £16.99