Where to start with William Faulkner

American novelist, 1897–1962. Won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1955 and 1963 and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1955.

Best William Faulkner book to start with: The Sound and the Fury (1929), on 6 of the 16 lists it could have made.

Start with As I Lay Dying. It is short, and told by many narrators, each in their own voice, as a family carries a coffin across the Mississippi countryside. It is the friendliest way in to his hardest style. Light in August comes next: a bigger book set in the same invented county, with some of his clearest storytelling.

The lists’ favourite is The Sound and the Fury, but it is a hard place to start, because the first section is narrated by a man with a very different sense of time, and it jumps about. Read it third, and expect to go back over it. Absalom, Absalom! is harder still, so save it until last.

The index also ranks A Fable and The Reivers highly because both won major prizes. They are minor Faulkner, and neither is where to begin. Requiem for a Nun and The Mansion are for completists: The Mansion is the third of a trilogy about the Snopes family, so read the first two before it.