Top ten books about being alone

Rebecca Dinerstein's new novel is The Sunlit Night. At the Guardian she tagged her top ten "books on solitude, remoteness and physical or psychic isolation," including:

An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel (1995)

[Twenty] years before she became Dame Mantel, the author of Wolf Hall wrote a captivating study of adolescence. This story of girls’ education in mid-century England follows Carmel McBain through a sequence of schools and cities; in each, she is an outsider. Mantel’s virtuosic, uncompromising prose and harsh anti-sentimentality give readers a story that is ordinary at the outset and harrowing in the end, full of the vivid confessions that describe isolation at its most relentless and raw.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see Teju Cole's top ten novels of solitude and Robert Williams's top ten loners in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue