My answer to "What's your favourite book?"

The "favourite book" question is an impossible one, of course. But this is the one I always end up giving as my answer. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, by Michael Ondaatje. It's a perfect little book, knitting a life of William "Billy the Kid" Bonney from history, mythology and Ondaatje's own imagining.

Now best known for The English Patient (also easily in my top five, and a vastly better book than a movie), Ondaatje is a staggering writer. Like the very best, he makes English sound new again. But he tends to do it with very simple words. It's poetic, but not flowery; lyrical without being pretentious. It's their placing - in relation to each other and sometimes even visually on the page - that makes Ondaatje's familiar words startlingly fresh and deeply resonant.

Ondaatje is equally renowned as a novelist and as a poet, and in this book the two disciplines dissolve into each other, forming something quite unique. A collection of poems weaving a story, or a novel written in poetic language? Who cares? This is how writing should be: grounded in character and story, economical, precise, fluent; at once earthy and unearthly...

No, it's no good: I can't do it justice. Read it. It's very short, but most writers fail to achieve this sort of beauty, scope, humanity and ferocity in books twice or three times the size.