About The Author

Justin Kerr-Smiley was born in 1965 and educated at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. He works as a journalist for Associated Press Television News in London and has reported from Northern Ireland, the Balkans and South America. He has also written for the Times and the Spectator. Under The Sun is his first novel.

Favourite novels- a baker's dozen.

• Lord Jim- Joseph Conrad
• Justine-Lawrence Durrell
• The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
• Lord Of The Flies- William Golding
• Jude The Obscure- Thomas Hardy
• A Farewell To Arms- Ernest Hemingway
• Narziss and Goldmund- Herman Hesse
• Ulysses- James Joyce
• The Leopard-Giuseppe di Lampedusa
• Mrs Dalloway- Virgina Woolf
• Rememberance of Things Past- Marcel Proust
• Treasure Island- Robert Louis Stevenson
• Sketches From A Hunter's Album- Ivan Turgenev

About the selection:

It's difficult as a novelist choosing your top ten novels-and in fact I couldn't, so it's a baker's dozen and even then there are painful omissions. One of them is George Orwell, a writer who has influenced me greatly. But Orwell's non-fiction work like 'Homage to Catalonia' is greater than his fiction, with the possible exception of Animal Farm. And there are others, such as the Russians: Chekhov, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. All three I have read and loved. In the end it's a matter of taste and the 'Russians' are well served by Turgenev, who probably writes better than anyone on the list. Even Chekhov tipped his hat to him. 'Sketches' of course is not a novel but a collection of short stories, but it can be read as a whole. Then there are the English 'greats' like Dickens, Thackeray, DH Lawrence, Swift, Defoe and the rest. Who to choose and which novel? So I went for one- Hardy's 'Jude The Obscure'. And no Cervantes? Again, Don Quixote should be there. But the foreign luminaries are well respresented by Proust and Lampedusa. Lampedusa could be considred a one hit wonder with the 'The Leopard', but what a hit. And where are the South Americans? Well, it's a list of novelists not poets, otherwise Pablo Neruda, Garbriela Mistral and Ruben Dario would all be in the running. So, sadly no Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As for Africa and Asia, again this is a list of novelists not poets. So no Matsuo Basho. Finally, my choices of both Golding's 'Lord Of The Flies' and Stevenson's 'Treasure Island', which many consider to be children's books. They are of course nothing of the sort, but their prose is so simple and lucid that children can enjoy them too. Of the novels that inspired me to be a writer- it is these two that set me off on my journey and to which I so often return.