The reader: Jacqueline Maley

Jac Maley was my first new friend at Fairfax (now FBFF) and I went totally top shelf with my selection. Jac writes the political sketch comedy column Under the Flag in The Sydney Morning Herald and therefore has the most impressive job title of anyone I know. She is a kindred spirit who, just like me, enjoys communicating soley by Google images, watching low rent reality TV and feeling good about the Obamas. Sadly, she has just moved to Canberra to be closer to the political action but the free time that living there provides means she got time to write down her three favourite books for me.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

"I read this at university, quite late really, and was confronted with a heroine who was completely unique, the sort of woman I had never seen fictionalised before, and yet whose inner life was instantly recognisable to me. She became a fiction-friend (you know, those characters in fiction who give you comfort and succour like actual real life friends)

It is a love story, yes, but it is also a story of survival and loneliness, the intense passions that lie hidden under the skin, the beauty and importance of personal freedom and how intregrity comes only through being true to your own values. The closest thing I have ever done to a pilgrimage was to the Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, where the Brontes spent their lives. I wandered the moors in the dark eerie light of the afternoon and tried to channel Jane and Cathy."

Fire in the Blood by Irene Nemirovsky

"I am a little obsessed with Irene Nemirovsky and her tragic story. The fact that her work has been re-discovered all these years after she was murdered by the Nazis seems to me such a beautiful affirmation of the power of literature.

This book is a small but perfectly formed one, set in the gossipy peasanty surroundings of a French village. Its theme is youth versus age, and the fact that young people run around blinded by passion, falling in and out of love, wreaking havoc and carrying out random emotional assaults on eachother. As you age, the drive to do all this falls away, but so does life. I love this theme. I also wonder how true it is, and you can tell Nemirovsky does too.

Once I interviewed Clive James (that clanging noise you hear is the sound of a name being dropped) in his Southbank apartment in London. I was recovering from a badly broken heart. Over croissants and cigarillos (truly), he told me that the love thing never gets easier. Whether you're 16 or 60, love happens. Your heart can still swoon and it can still hurt.

I still can't decide whether that is depressing or heartening."

Broken April by Ismail Kadare

"My grandma (whose taste in all things is impeccable and who I want to be like when I grow up) introduced me to Kadare. This book is about an Albanian blood feud and taught me fascinating historical and cultural things about Balkan history wot I didn't know before.

The writing style is sparse and bleak, and the loneliness and brutality of the countryside pervades the whole book, creating an incredible atmosphere. In anyone else's hands, the subject matter would turn to melodrama, but Kadare is so skilful, he gives his readers something universal. But he's not always such a Serious Sam: he also writes satire! 

(The File on H, 1990)"

Runaway OR INDEED ANYTHING EVER WRITTEN by Alice Munro

"Okay, now I'm at four books. See? This is too hard. But I couldn't not include Munro. For my money she's the best writer working today. Her themes are simple and pure, she only writes short stories, and she chronicles the small lives of Canadian country-folk. Often nothing important happens in her stories, and yet all of life is there, in every one of them. I cannot for the life of me work out how she does it. She is compulsively readable and utterly brilliant."

(Caveat: "these books are not necessarily my favest-of-all-time-full-stop. I could never commit to something so fixed! But they are ones that have stayed with me, and will always".)