Books that Saved My Life

A profound, funny and uplifting collection of reminiscences about a life in books.

Here are forty texts to read at some stage in your life: forty texts that can enrich you in all manner of ways. 

Some are recent, like Harry Potter; some ancient, like Homer and Lao Tzu. There are memoirs (Nelson Mandela), poetry (Les Murray) and many of the world’s great novels, from George Eliot’s Middlemarch to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

Our guide, in entertaining short essays about personal encounters with each of these works, is Michael McGirr: schoolteacher and former priest, reviewer of hundreds of novels and lifelong lover of literature. His humour and insight shine through in stories that connect the texts he has selected with each other, and connect us to them.

Never prescriptive, and often very funny, this book is an invitation to reflect on—and share with others—the extraordinary gift of reading. ‘It is a gift that is taking me a lifetime to unwrap,’ McGirr writes. ‘The excitement has never worn off.’ 

Great literature is thrilling. It will feed your hungry mind and take your heart on a journey. It will help you on the path of one of life’s most elusive and hard-won freedoms, freedom from the ego.

Michael McGirr is the bestselling author of Snooze, Bypass and Things You Get for Free. He has reviewed almost one thousand books, his short fiction has appeared in publications in Australia and overseas, and he has been publisher of Eureka Street and fiction editor of Meanjin. He is a high-school teacher and lives in Melbourne with his wife, Jenny, and their three teenage children.


‘McGirr is an inspired synthesiser, serious in intent even while riotous in execution.’ Eureka Street on Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep

‘His anecdotes will make you laugh out loud. If you haven’t read any books by him before, seek them out’. Good Reading

‘Readers will come for the humour, but they’ll stay for McGirr’s haunting memories…brimming with lyrical insight and earthy humour, this debut is a rare treat’. Publishers Weekly on Things You Get For Free