Hi Lisamartin, sorry for the very late reply! (book nuts are my favourite people, by the way;-)
Perhaps I'm weird but I honestly don't know. There are many great books out there, but I don't really have a 'best book ever'. For me it has always been about certain passages, if something particular grabs me*, I tend to call that a good book, although as a whole it might not be considered the best book ever written, do you know what I mean?
* Usually that happens when compassion and wonderment and beauty are involved. I can be so deeply impressed by a sentence or a paragraph that it stays with me for days, sometimes even longer.
E.g. I'm still touched very much by this passage in The History of Love by Nicole Krauss: http://plankjeongeregeld.typep.....n-eig.html
(for me there's a tender respect in there without being sappy - not always easy to pull off!)
And there's a relatively 'new' Belgian writer, Dimitri Verhulst, who's an absolute master at this. He usually tells 'small' stories in such exquisite simple language, and he gets me every time...
If his latest novel 'Mevrouw Verona daalt de heuvel af' (Mrs. Verona comes down the hill) ever gets translated into English, then I would highly recommend it. (I'm keeping my thumbs crossed that the translator will be able to conserve his use of language; he's known to use somewhat archaic and inherently Flemish words in his work; but with him it's never far-fetched and always so right for his characters and story - but it will be very difficult to transpose this into another language).
By the way: 'The Master and Margarita' is one of the many books on my 'still to read pile' (which is ever-growing, but I don't mind that one bit).
