Charles Finch

At the moment I'm reading the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope's epic standalone The Way We Live Now for the second time. Trollope is a writer I find deeply comforting: unsurprising, conventional, fascinated with the mores of a very narrow world, often funny, always interesting, wry, and above all compassionate. He rarely condemns a character entirely, which for me is a sure sign of strength and humanity in a writer of the Victorian period, a condemnatory era. (Consider on the other hand Ralph Nickleby or Fagin.) And I've rarely had a more satisfying experience than first reading the Palliser novels. (Tolstoy was a fan, though he quite rightly found Trollope too conventional, and mentioned the Palliser books in Anna Karenina.)

People often call The Way We Live Now relevant or timely, and it's true - in poor, stupid Melmotte we find the various disgraced CEOs and political figures we've all grown so tired of. But I love it more for its less iconic characters; since I've become a writer, for instance, I've met more than one person like the manipulative but endearing Lady Carbury.