Where to start with Don DeLillo

American novelist, born 1936. Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1985.

Best Don DeLillo book to start with: Underworld (1997), on 4 of the 18 lists it could have made.

Start with White Noise, which won the National Book Award in 1985. It is short, it is funnier than its reputation, and it shows his style at once: a professor of Hitler studies, his large family and a chemical cloud drifting over a small American town. The lists prefer Underworld, shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but it is enormous and makes more sense once you know how he writes. When you get there, give it fifty pages. The opening is a famous baseball game, and the later sections move back through the decades.

Libra, shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1988, is the one to read if you like a plot. It imagines the people around Lee Harvey Oswald, and it moves like a thriller. Mao II, shortlisted for the Pulitzer in 1992, is about a reclusive writer and is the quietest of the four, so it suits a reader who has already settled into his style.