Best books… Rory Kinnear

The Olivier Award-winning actor chooses his favourite books. He stars in BBC2’s Christmas ghost story The Mezzotint, on 24 December, and is currently in a new stage adaptation of Force Majeure (see below)

Ulysses by James Joyce, 1920 (Penguin £9.99). Hard not to come across as a self-regarding tosspot when you claim Joyce’s masterwork as your favourite book of all time, but there you are. I first read it at 17 and it changed my understanding of the possibilities of writing and reading.

Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1986 (HarperCollins £8.99). I’d happily choose any of this writer’s works. In almost every sentence, let alone novel, she confounds expectation, eschews cliché, upends convention – while the stories themselves occupy a world both familiar and disconcerting. At a push, I’d choose this, a hypnotically odd antiromantic comedy set in a grim Tuscany of the not-so-fabulous 1950s, as my favourite.

The Snow Beast by Chris Judge, 2015 (Andersen Press £6.99). I miss reading to my kids. I suppose I could insist but I fear they’d only listen out of pity. This one we read so often that even the sight of its illustrations can bring back the smell, the touch, even the speech patterns of their threeand four-year-old selves.

Season of Migration to the

North by Tayeb Salih, 1966 (Penguin £9.99). I have loved so many of the NYRB’s reissues of underappreciated or out-of-print classics. This short, lyrical, searing book, set in a village on the banks of the Nile in Sudan, vividly illustrates the inescapable cycles of pain and violence the bringers of imperialism leave behind when they’re gone.

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2003 (Fourth Estate £8.99). A bit like Paul Thomas Anderson’s early films, this book repeatedly makes you ask yourself: how is someone this young writing this perfectly? Complete mastery of character and plot, combined with a searing emotional intelligence, and still only 26. The fact that she has continued to get even better makes my jaw gape even wider in wonderment.