Kia ora and welcome to the Reading Doctor! Each week, literary critic and devoted reader Dr Louise recommends books to us on a particular theme, or responds to reader questions. Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org

This week, Louise answers a reader request:

Kia ora,

I would love to receive a personalised reading list. I am interested in books about people overcoming challenges in life and achieving specific goals. Many thanks, Vitoria

Hi Vitoria,

I’ve chosen a list of novels here which could be called quest novels, in which characters must negotiate obstacles, distractions and problems as they seek an object, journey towards a destination, or strive to achieve a goal. They often also involve a satisfyingly happy ending.

· A Christian allegory which describes the journey from this world to that which is to come, The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan has its everyman hero encounter and overcome such impediments as the Slough of Despond, Mr Worldly Wiseman and Beelzebub himself on his way to deliverance.

· Beginning as a search for a missing cat, Haruki Murakami’s hefty novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle leads our questing hero to strange places and eccentric characters, through which he learns a great deal about himself.

· Frodo must brave a perilous journey, an evil wizard, various orcs and a wily Gollum to find the ring, in The Hobbit by J R R Tolkien.

· Upon receipt of a letter from a dying friend, Harold begins the long walk to her bedside, in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce, meeting with both helpers and hinderers on his trek, and confronting a variety of inner demons.

· A group of war veterans take a journey to scatter the ashes of their fallen comrade, in accordance with his last wishes, in the Booker prize-winning novel Last Orders by Graham Swift.

· Like Odysseus, Frank Money is journeying Home, in the novel by Toni Morrison, carrying the traumas of the battlefield of the Korean War back to racist America, searching for that fabled place we he belongs.

· An autograph hunter obsessively pursues an elusive celebrity in The Autograph Man by Zadie Smith.

· A research scientist journeys to the Amazon in search of her former mentor, who mysteriously disappeared while working on the development of a new and valuable drug, in State of Wonder by Ann Patchett.

· An elderly man goes looking for his dreamy, cello-playing brother who disappeared from his life many years ago, in Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler.

· An elderly couple go in search of the son they think they might have had in the fantasy novel The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, set in a fictional post-Arthurian Britain in which no-one is able to retain long-term memories.