Jon McGregor's top 10 dead bodies in literature

Jon McGregor is the author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and So Many Ways to Begin. He is the winner of the Betty Trask prize and the Somerset Maugham award, and has been twice longlisted for the Man Booker prize. He was born in Bermuda in 1976. He grew up in Norfolk and now lives in Nottingham. Even the Dogs, published, his third novel, is published in paperback this month.

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"Literature that focuses on a person made absent by death is about as old as literature itself; some of the first stories told were, I imagine, laments for those lost and speculations about where they might have gone. But the books I've chosen here are mostly ones where the dead body, although central, is only a starting point for a study of that person's life and the life of the people he or she was close to; and the stories which surround the dead person's body are given greater shape by coalescing around that central absence.

"That, by startling coincidence, is what happens in Even The Dogs which, although also about addiction, friendship, damage and exclusion, is mainly about what happens to a man's body after he dies alone; the acts of removal, examination, washing, dressing and burying which are performed by the state on behalf of the community. And running alongside the story of that death are the stories of the people who should have been with him when he died.

"These are some of the books which gave me the idea."

1.As I Lay Dying William Faulkner

From the opening image of the son building his mother's coffin outside the room where she lies dying, it's clear that this is the work of an uncompromising visionary. Brutal and bleak and tender, full of dark moments and astounding images and basically just as good as everyone says.

2. Being Dead by Jim Crace

The bodies of a murdered couple decay, undiscovered, on a beach. A wonderful, forensic examination of all the small deaths which precede our final exit, and of the pleasures to be found in overcoming them. Also, fantastically and lovingly detailed about the intricate ways in which our bodies will decay. Not, despite the setting, an ideal beach read.

3. So He Takes the Dog by Jonathan Buckley

Another beach, another body: but this time the body becomes the focus for a quiet masterpiece of character study, as Buckley uses the worn format of a murder inquiry to examine the bruised lives of a small seaside community. The dead man remains, despite much investigation and speculation, an enigma; the lives of those around him are detailed in movingly understated prose. "Some weeping occurred" is still one of my favourite sentences in contemporary literature.

4. How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman

There are no dead bodies in this one, and not even a death as such. But I'm including it because I've always read Sammy's sudden blindness as a kind of metaphorical purgatory; and as he staggers round Glasgow trying to make sense of it all we're confronted by one of Kelman's great characters in relentless and defiant and visceral full-flow.

5. Inferno: The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

To the modern mind, with its adherence to progress and change, the idea of death as leading to a state of perpetuity is properly terrifying. And there's no better exponent of this terror than Dante, surely, with his strange guided tour through scenes of boiling tar and flayed skins. The doomed souls who profess that, "cut off from hope, we live on desire" represent, for me, the authentically heroic voice of all those who, in impossible circumstances, fight on.

6. 'So Much Water So Close to Home' by Raymond Carver (collected in Short Cuts)

The one where the group of men on a camping trip find the body of a woman in the river they're intending to fish, and leave her there until the weekend's over. Obviously, being Carver, the story's actually about one of the men's relationship with his wife, and his inability to understand her disgust. ("I'm as sorry as anyone else. But she was dead." Have you seen a better encapsulation of the sometimes terrible logic espoused by men?)

7. The Tall Man by Chloe Hooper

This isn't a novel, but it reads like one. Starting with a body – that of Cameron Doomadgee, an aboriginal man who died in the police station on Palm Island, Australia – Hooper tells a story of the dead man and his alleged killer, and of the tangled history of their communities' relationship, in a blend of reportage and history which builds towards a powerful story of the nation. Compassionate, thoughtful, nuanced, and ultimately outraged, this is a wonder of contemporary non-fiction.

8. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

The premise – an elderly dying man writes a letter to his young son, narrating the course of his life along the way – sounds schmaltzy and unpromising. But from the second paragraph – "It seems ridiculous to suppose the dead miss anything" – it's clear that Marilynne Robinson knows her character, and knows the story she wants to tell, and has the craft and patience and wit required to tell it well.

9. Nox by Anne Carson

This might seem a tenuous example of "a dead body in literature", but with such an uncategorisable piece of work that only seems appropriate. Anne Carson's concertinaed-scroll-in-a-box is, at root, an elegy for her dead brother. But it is also a translation of a poem by the Roman poet Catallus, or rather a study towards such a translation, a "series of lexical entries" as Carson puts it, as well as a scrapbook of memories, reflections, snapshots and drawings which build towards something monumental around the absent shape of her brother. Anne Carson calls it a poem, and I'm not going to argue. Although I would also call it the publishing triumph of 2010.

10. The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

The twin stories of Lazarus Averbuch, a young Russian Jewish immigrant shot dead by Chicago's chief of police in 1908, and of a narrator – Hemon's restless and talkative alter-ego – who researches Averbuch's life and death. At once funny and awful, outraged and reflective, the book manages to become both a memorial to a near-forgotten victim and – the best, the only response to death – an exhortation to hope. I'm not even sure this is Hemon's best book, but he's certainly one of the most interesting young writers working in America today.