The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway would be my first choice. They are wonderfully entertaining and thought-provoking stories, one cannot but admire the way that in a few pages Hemingway creates situations that are as much vividly dramatic as they are contemporary. The trick is, I suppose, that his stories are stripped of most of their spatial and temporal dimensions: they could be taking place anywhere, at any time in the last hundred years or so and at any culture. One feels that his flawed, unhappy characters could be oneself.

 

My second choice would be Love in the Time of Cholera, one of my best-loved books from the first time that I read it, drawn to it by Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s dreamy and funny narrative of a Quixotic quest for true love.

 

One has to have the consolation of music on a desert island too, so my last choice would be The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, a comprehensive collection of the work of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Nothing escapes the strokes of Neruda’s pen: love and happiness, nature, decay, seclusion, nationality, politics… Reading his poems one hears the melody of the words in one’s mind as loudly as listening to a live orchestra – all while keeping an eye on the horizon for any passing ships, of course.