I will refer to his play Uncle Vanya, because it is one in which he features the overworked, pessimistic and resigned doctor Astrov. Anton Chekhov remained a doctor throughout his life, alongside his writing. Trollope famously worked for most of his life in the Post Office (in fairly senior positions, I should add), and this ‘keeping of the day job’ is what he has in common with the next writer.

The map below of the fictional county of Barsetshire does tempt me though – I can never resist a map. I’ve read a couple of his freestanding works a long, long time ago, and was never quite as enamoured of him as I was of Wilkie Collins or Dickens. One series of six novels which I keep meaning to read but never quite get muster the courage is The Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope. But I was more lukewarm about volumes 3 and 5 and didn’t bother with the rest. Stand up, Mr Karl Ove Knausgård! I was intrigued and captivated by the first two volumes of his six-volume My Struggle ( A Death in the Family and A Man in Love), partly because it felt like a novelty for a man to be writing about such intimate domestic details. Yes, I read all of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, but was less engaged with it than I was with her earlier work.

It would be far too easy to move onto DH Lawrence after this, but instead I will move to other authors whom I originally liked a lot, but whom I’ve stopped following quite so closely over recent years. I have not read it yet, but am curious to do so. A woman invites a famous artist to use her guesthouse in the remote coastal landscape where she lives with her family, hoping that his artistic vision will somehow infuse and clarify her own life. The starting point this month is Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, which is loosely based on DH Lawrence stay as a houseguest in Mexico (Mabel Doge Luhan being the unfortunate host she wrote about it in Lorenzo in Taos). Time for my favourite meme: the chain of six books, linked in some way from a given starting point, as hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best.

Second place rachel cusk goodreads