Authors Like Jon McGregor

Virginia Woolf

British · Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931)

Woolf (1882–1941) co-founded the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard in 1917. Mrs Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway through a single June day in London in 1923 as she prepares for a party, and slips into the minds of people she passes or never meets, among them the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith.

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

Dylan Thomas

Welsh · Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), Under Milk Wood (1954)

Thomas was born in Swansea in 1914 and died in New York in 1953, aged 39. Under Milk Wood, a ‘play for voices’ first broadcast by the BBC in January 1954, follows the inhabitants of Llareggub, an invented Welsh fishing village, through one spring day, from their dreams at night to the following evening.

Ronald Blythe

British · Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969)

Blythe was born in Suffolk in 1922 and died in 2023, aged 100, at his farmhouse on the Essex–Suffolk border. For Akenfield he spent the winter of 1966–67 listening to three generations of his neighbours, and shaped what they told him into a portrait of an invented Suffolk village between 1880 and 1966. Peter Hall made a film of it in 1974.

Raymond Carver

American · What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), Cathedral (1983)

Carver was born in Oregon in 1938 and wrote about waitresses, salesmen and out-of-work husbands in plain, short sentences. After his death in 1988 it emerged that his editor, Gordon Lish, had heavily cut the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; the longer versions appeared as Beginners in 2009.

Kent Haruf

American · Plainsong (1999), Our Souls at Night (2015)

Haruf was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in 1943 and died in 2014. All his novels are set in Holt, a fictional town on the plains of eastern Colorado. Plainsong, a finalist for the National Book Award, weaves together a teacher raising two boys, a pregnant teenager and two elderly bachelor farmers who take her in.

Every book by Kent Haruf →

Max Porter

British · Grief Is the Thing with Feathers (2015), Lanny (2019), Shy (2023)

Porter managed a branch of Daunt Books and was an editorial director at Granta and Portobello Books, where he edited The Luminaries and The Vegetarian. Lanny (2019) is about a family in a village near London, peopled, in his publisher’s words, by the living and the dead, and a boy with a gift for friendship who goes missing. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019.

Sarah Moss

British · Ghost Wall (2018), Summerwater (2020), Ripeness (2025)

Moss was born in Glasgow in 1975 and grew up in Manchester. Summerwater takes place over a single rainy summer day at a holiday park of cabins in Scotland, moving between the people staying there; Channel 4 adapted it for television in 2025. Ghost Wall follows a teenage girl on a re-enactment of Iron Age life in northern England, led by her controlling father, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize.

Claire Keegan

Irish · Foster (2010), Small Things Like These (2021)

Keegan was born in County Wicklow in 1968 and is best known for two very short books. In Foster a girl is sent to spend a summer with relatives on a farm, where she is cared for in a way she has never been at home. Small Things Like These, about a coal merchant in 1985 who discovers what is happening in the local Magdalene laundry, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022.

Every book by Claire Keegan →

Jim Crace

British · Quarantine (1997), Harvest (2013)

Crace was born in Hertfordshire in 1946. Harvest is set over seven days in a remote English village in an unnamed century, narrated by a villager, Walter Thirsk, as strangers arrive and the land is enclosed. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2015.

Tana French

Irish-American · In the Woods (2007), The Likeness (2008), The Searcher (2020)

French was born in Vermont in 1973 and trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin. In the Woods, the first of her Dublin Murder Squad novels, is about a detective who as a boy was the only one of three children to come back from a wood, and who now investigates a girl’s murder nearby. It won the Edgar Award for best first novel.

Every book by Tana French →