To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books August 2, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/bag/1999/08/02/fitzgerald "This is it!" The author of "The Blue Flower" picks five novels that rocked her world. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Penelope Fitzgerald With each one of these novels I thought, as soon as I'd read the first page, This is it. It's difficult to argue about this, although I've sometimes had to, but in reading many hundreds of novels, some of them very good, I've had the sensation quite rarely. A Pale View of Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro A novel unlike any other, set in the wasteland of Nagasaki after the war, where a seemingly quiet story of mothers and their small daughters takes an undefinably sinister turn. Kruger's Alp by Christopher Hope The first novelist I read who treated South African politics not as a tragedy but as a black farce (which, of course, is tragedy the other way up). Hôtel du Lac by Anita Brookner Exquisitely, meticulously written but still -- there isn't any other word for it -- romantic. The Snapper by Roddy Doyle You have to laugh, you can't help it, and you feel picked up and shaken by its energy, but I hope Roddy Doyle won't mind my saying that the great virtue of this book is tenderness. The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills The jacket picture of this brilliantly original first novel is, in my view, a mistake. The displaced Scottish fence-wirers don't kill anyone ... There are just a few unfortunate accidents. salon.com | August 2, 1999