• What's your favorite Iris Murdoch novel, and why? Share your thoughts.

I was introduced to Iris Murdoch’s novels in the early 1980s, and I read them, in no particular order, in a flurry of delight and awe, thoroughly convinced that she was among the most brilliant writers I had ever encountered, an opinion I still hold. Even when I read a novel of hers that didn’t quite click with me, I knew I was in the presence of a major twentieth-century writer. In fact, one of the major regrets of my reading life is that I don’t think I will have enough time to reread her twenty-six novels, which were written over the course of nearly forty years.

Here’s a list of Murdoch’s novels, with asterisks by my very favorites:

Under the Net
The Flight from the Enchanter
The Sandcastle
The Bell
A Severed Head
An Unofficial Rose
The Unicorn
The Italian Girl
The Red and the Green
The Time of the Angels
The Nice and the Good
*Bruno’s Dream
*A Fairly Accidental Man
*The Black Prince
*A Word Child
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
Henry and Cato
*The Sea, the Sea (Murdoch’s only Booker prize-winning novel)
Nuns and Soldiers
*The Philosopher’s Pupil
*The Good Apprentice
*The Book and the Brotherhood
The Message to the Planet
The Green Knight
Jackson’s Dilemma

[Excerpted from Book Lust]