William Boyd

I revere Chekhov as a writer – of short stories. And I’m absolutely fascinated by the man himself, also. Any volume of Chekhov’s mature stories – the ones he wrote in the last ten years of his life – will contain masterworks but if you only had to read one Chekhov story then his longest, “My Life”, will open the door to his particular genius. His sensibility is completely modern, it seems to me, he speaks to us today as much as to his 19th century contemporaries.