Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien: WH Auden thought this tale
of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a
"masterpiece".
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee: A child’s-eye view of
racial prejudice and weird neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore: A rich
Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: Earth
is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
One Thousand and One Nights Anon: A Persian king’s new bride
tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe :
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie: The children of poor
Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre: Nursery rhyme
provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons : Hilarious satire on
doom-laden rural romances. "Something nasty" has been observed in the
woodshed.
The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki: The life and loves of an
emperor’s son. And possibly the world’s first novel?
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch: A feckless writer has dealings
with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing: Lessing considers
communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls "inner
space fiction."
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin: Passion, poetry and
pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac: Beat generation boys aim to
"burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles."
Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac: A disillusioning dose of
Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero "Rastingnac" became a
byword for ruthless social climbing.
The Red and the Black by Stendhal: Plebian hero struggles
against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his "force
diame."
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas: "One for all
and all for one:" the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious
Milady.
Germinal by Emile Zola: Written to "germinate"
social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French
miners.
The Stranger by Albert Camus: Frenchman kills an Arab friend
in Algiers and accepts "the gentle indifference of the world."
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco: Illuminating historical
whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey: An Australian heiress bets
an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys: Prequel to Jane Eyre giving
moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: Carroll’s
ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before
breakfast.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller: Yossarian feels a homicidal
impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
The Trial by Franz Kafka: K proclaims he’s innocent when
unexpectedly arrested. But "innocent of what?"
Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee: Protagonist’s "first
long secret drink of golden fire" is under a hay wagon.
Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan: Gentle comedy in
which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque: The horror
of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler: Three
siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin: Profound and
panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: Garibaldi’s
Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the "jackals" ousting the nobility,
or "leopards."
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino:
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
Crash by JG Ballard: Former TV scientist preaches "a
new sexuality, born from a perverse technology."
A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul: East African Indian Salim
travels to the heart of Africa and finds "The world is what it is."
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Boy meets
pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia,
redemption.
Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak: Romantic young doctor’s
idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz: Follows three
generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis
Stevenson: This famous novella has been adapted for movies, opera and plays.
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift: Swift’s scribulous
satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk: A painter is murdered in
Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
London Fields by Martin Amis: A failed novelist steals a
woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaoo: Gang of South
American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse: Intellectuals withdraw
from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
The Tin Drum by Gnter Grass: Madhouse memories of the Second
World War. Key text of European magic realism.
Austerlitz by WG Sebald: Paragraph-less novel in which a
Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov: Scholar’s sexual obsession with
a prepubescent "nymphet" is complicated by her mother’s passion for
him.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: After nuclear war
has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger: Expelled from a
"phony" prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult
phase.
Underworld by Don DeLillo: From baseball to nuclear waste,
all late-20th-century American life is here.
Beloved by Toni Morrison: Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected
journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: "Okies" set
out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin: Explores the
role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera: A
doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t
matter.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark: A meddling
teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet: Did the watch salesman
kill the girl on the beach? If so, who heard?
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre: A historian becomes increasingly
sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
The Rabbit books by John Updike: A former high school
basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: A boy and
a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum
"sivilisation."
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle: A drug
addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: Lily Bart craves luxury
too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe: A Nigerian yam farmer’s
local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: A mysterious
millionaire’s love for a woman with "a voice full of money" gets him
in trouble.
The Warden by Anthony Trollope: "Of all novelists in
any country, Trollope best understands the role of money," said WH Auden.
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: An ex-convict struggles to
become a force for good, but it ends badly.
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis: An uncommitted history lecturer
clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler: "Dead men are
heavier than broken hearts" in this hardboiled crime noir.
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson: Epistolary adventure whose
heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell: Twelve-book
saga whose most celebrated character wears "the wrong kind of
overcoat."
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky: Published 60 years
after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life
in Nazi-occupied France.
Atonement by Ian McEwan: Puts the "c" word in the
classic English country house novel.
Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec: The jigsaw puzzle of
lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding : Thigh-thwacking yarn of a
foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Human endeavours "to mock
the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world" have tragic
consequences.
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell: Northern villagers turn their
bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins: Hailed by TS Eliot as
"the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective
novels."
Ulysses by James Joyce: Modernist masterpiece reworking of
Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest "sentences" in English
literature: 4,391 words.
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert: Buying the lies of
romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
A Passage to India by EM Forster: A false accusation exposes
the racist oppression of British rule in India.
1984 by George Orwell: In which Big Brother is even more
sinister than the TV series it inspired.
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Samuel Johnson thought
Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells: Bloodsucking Martian
invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh: Waugh based the hapless junior
reporter in this journalistic farce on former
Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy : Sexual double
standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene: A seaside sociopath mucks up
murder and marriage in Greene’s novel.
The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse: A scrape-prone
toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s gentleman.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: Out on the winding, windy
moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s "souls." Then he
leaves.
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens: Debt and deception in
Dickens’s semi-autobiographical
Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and
capital fellows.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: A slave trader is
shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Every proud posh boy
deserves a bratty, prejudiced girl.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: Picaresque tale about
quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: Septimus’s suicide doesn’t
spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
Disgrace by JM Coetzee: An English professor in
post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Poor and obscure and plain as
she is, Mr. Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust: Seven-volume
meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: "The conquest of
the earth," said Conrad, "is not a pretty thing."
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James: An American heiress
in Europe "affronts her destiny" by marrying an adulterous egoist.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress
grew from a daydream of "a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow."
Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Monomaniacal Captain Ahab
seeks vengeance on the white whale that ate his leg.
Middlemarch by George Eliot: "One of the few English
novels written for grown-up people," said Virginia Woolf.
