The Telegraph 500 Must-Read Books
WAR AND HISTORY
History of the Peloponnesian War / Thucydides (c400 BC)
Generally agreed to be the first of its kind, Thucydides's history covers the war between Sparta and
Athens, and though its accuracy remains moot - Thucydides was an Athenian general and so likely to be
selective in his emphasis - it is an astonishing, rich and detailed drama to which historians return again
and again.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire / Edward Gibbon (1776-1789)
"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortune of mankind," Gibbons wrote
in this classic history tracing the Roman Empire from the 1st Century BC to the 15th AD. Vast, learned,
opinionated, and witty, it is an absolute epic.
A Farewell to Arms / Ernest Hemingway (1929)
Set in the Italian theatre during the First World War, Hemingway's short, powerful, semiautobiographical
novel is guaranteed to make any grown man cry, but it is also a penetrating study of camaraderie in the
face of danger and is, as you'd expect, beautifully written in telling sentences.
1066 and All That / W C Sellar and R J Yeatman (1930)
Subtitled "A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103
Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates" 1066... is a tongue in cheek send-up of the way history
used to be taught, and may yet be again.
All Quiet on the Western Front / Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
"This book is neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure": so begins the
remarkable semiautobiographical, humane and poignant novel about Remarque's experiences in the
trenches and back in Germany after the war.
Legion of the Damned / Sven Hassel (1953)
Written in highly suspicious circumstances by a highly suspicious author (or perhaps his wife, or editor)
this is the first in a series of novels that became cartoonish, yet for all that it packs immense power,
describing the misadventures of a group of German soldiers on the Eastern Front.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples / Winston Churchill (1956-1958)
A magisterial, if patchy, four-part history of Britain from Anglo-Saxon times to 1914, it was begun in
1937 but subsequently much delayed. Subjective, erratic, with a romantic view of the world, it is full of
character and incident, and is beautifully written.
Sword of Honour Trilogy / Evelyn Waugh (1952-1961)
Loosely autobiographical, this three-part meandering, tragic-comic farce paints a convincingly chaotic
picture of the British muddling their way to winning the war. It is beautifully world weary and cynical, as
the hapless hero is buffeted by the forces of class, waste, spite, cowardice and inefficiency.
A History of the Crusades / Steven Runciman (1951-1954)
A classic three-part history of the crusades written with such elegance and dash, one might think he was
making it all up. Historians have since frowned on his technique, and recent research has revealed some
factual flaws, yet Runciman remains required reading.
The Making of the Middle Ages / R W Southern (1953)
Written while the author thought he had only a short time left to live, this concise and unadorned primer
has become a classic introduction to how Europeans lived in the early middle ages.
Catch-22 / Joseph Heller (1961)
The blackest and yet funniest book ever written on any subject. The "hero" is a bomber pilot flying sorties
over Italy where thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him, but it is not them he's most
frightened of: it's his own side who seem determined to do the job themselves.
The Guns of August / Barbara W Tuchman (1962)
Tuchman was awarded the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for this superb analysis of how and why the
European powers went to war in 1914, and what could have been done to stop them. Tuchman enlivens
the complex issue to make the book as compulsive as any thriller.
Slaughterhouse-5 / Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
A satire of more than just war, Slaughterhouse-5 mixes elements of science fiction with the novel's
central event: the bombing of Dresden in 1945. Vonnegut was there at the time, an American PoW, who
survived the fire storm by sheltering in a slaughterhouse.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee / Dee Brown (1970)
Following the heartbreaking travails of the American Indians from their first contact with white settlers
until the massacre at Wounded Knee, Dee Brown's book covers what was in effect their ethnic cleansing
by the American Government.
The Face of Battle / John Keegan (1976)
The late John Keegan dissects the ordinary soldier's experience in three key battles from English history:
Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme and shows how, despite the technological changes, what is asked of
a man in war remains fundamentally the same. An absolute classic of the genre.
Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324 / Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
(1978)
A ground-breaking micro-history of a small French village, researched from the records of a local
inquisitor who went on to become Pope. Revelatory of the medieval mindset, as well as more general
society.
A Bright Shining Lie / Neil Sheehan (1988)
The life and death of an American colonel who went to Vietnam in the 1960s, didn't like what he saw cowardice and incompetence, rather than a wrong war - and so went on to tell the world's press about it.
A fascinating study, not just of the war but of a man.
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland / Christopher R
Browning (1992)
Browning uses records to show how an ordinary group of men became involved in the Final Solution and
how just as easily humanity in general might be perverted to evil.
Longitude / Dava Sobel (1998)
Responsible for many copycat histories of previously overlooked trifles, Dava Sobel's diminutive
masterpiece describes 18th-century British clock maker John Harrison's invention of a timepiece accurate
enough to measure longitude at sea.
The Discovery of France / Graham Robb (2007)
A very different France to the one we think we know emerges from Graham Robb's unconventional
history: one that is impossibly rural, remote, and insular, where no two villages speak the same dialect
and peasants hibernate through the winter. The shock is how recently this was the case.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Histories / Tacitus (100-110 AD)
The Good Soldier Svejk / Jaroslav Hasek (1923)
The Naked and the Dead / Norman Mailer (1948)
Dispatches / Michael Herr (1977)
Birdsong / Sebastian Faulks (1993)
Captain Corelli's Mandolin / Louis de Bernieres (1994)
Regeneration Trilogy / Pat Barker (1991-1995)
Europe: A history / Norman Davies (1996)
Guns, Germs and Steel / Jared Diamond (1997)
The Siege / Helen Dunmore (2001)
A Short History of Nearly Everything / Bill Bryson (2003)
Hitler / Ian Kershaw (2008)
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War / Antony Beevor (1982)
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire / David Cannadine (2001)
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution / Simon Schama (1989)
EUROPEAN AND RUSSIAN CLASSICS
The Trial / Franz Kafka (1925)
It starts with an arrest for no apparent reason, before ensaring the reader in a world of implicit guilt and
looming punishment. Often read as a fable about the sinister state, it's just as terrifying for what it
makes us think about ourselves.
If This Is a Man / Primo Levi (1947)
When Levi's shaming testimony of the death camps first appeared, it was so shocking that it was ignored.
But its assertion of humanity in the face of the worst humans can do has made it all the more urgent.
Life: A User's Manual / Georges Perec (1978)
It seems as though Perec fits the whole of life and history into this beady-eyed tour of a condemned
(imaginary) Paris apartment block. Objects spotted on shelves are the starting points for beguiling,
quirky stories that can take the reader everywhere.
Don Quixote / Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615)
For all the scorn the novel hurls at its "hero" in the pasteboard helmet attacking strangers to defend the
honour of a lightly moustached girl who thinks he's a twit, it's impossible not to love Quixote and his
dreams of a nobler world.
The Confessions / Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Rousseau's project was to analyse himself, with all his faults, foibles and failures, from the ones that
most haunt him (weeing in saucepans) to the ones he can get over (putting five children in orphanages).
This assertion of the individual did a lot to change Europe.
Remembrance of Things Past / Marcel Proust (1913-1927)
In spite of those massive sentences, the slippery theme of memory and the eight digressive novels,
Proust's probing, almost autobiographical masterpiece is full of gossip, snobbery, flirting, sex, jokes and
the most illuminating similes this side of Homer.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being / Milan Kundera (1984)
The sophisticated, teasingly essay-like style is Kundera's best defence against the totalitarian crassness
that engulfs his Prague and his characters, who juggle the serious with the seductively superficial - from
Beethoven, through burying a dog, to the pros and cons of window cleaning.
Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy (1877)
Here is Russian high society observed with ruthless realism and a mastery of each character's inner life.
Does Tolstoy make a sustained appearance in the character of Levin, the well-meaning suitor and fatherdo-be? The novel is all the better for it.
Zorba the Greek / Nikos Kazantzakis (1946)
An intellectual wants to experience the pulse of real Greek life: in the character of Zorba, the "man made
of rubber" he finds it, along with a uniquely Greek mix of hospitality, piety and violence.
The Decameron / Giovanni Boccaccio (after 1350)
This network of a hundred stories, exchanged by aristocrats escaping the plague in Florence, is by turns
ennobling and naughty, but always a celebration of the way a story can console its hearers, or at least
divert them.
If On A Winter's Night a Traveller / Italo Calvino (1979)
The plot is - you buy a copy of If on a Winter's Night... So does someone who's just your type. But you're
both missing bits. You become the detective in this splendidly funny tale, told through parodies of all
those clever, tricksome European writers.
Crime and Punishment / Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
We know who did it; the detective knows. But will we know why a student murdered his landlady? This is
thrilling psychology, in which Dostoevsky's empathy with angry idealists, downtrodden women and
tormented sensualists takes him deep into the urban Russian soul.
The Princess of Cleves / Madame de Lafayette (1678)
This tale of a noblewoman who must live for love, whatever the cost, has been called the first
psychological novel. Later novelists, such as George Sand, still found plenty of material here they could
use to create scandals in later ages.
A Hero of Our Time / Mikhail Lermontov (1839)
In a wry, detached tone, Lermontov explores that very wry detachedness that leads to duels and a
consistent indifference to love and fate. The problem is, can the reader remain indifferent to the dashing
Pechorin as he wrecks lives around the Caucasus?
Confessions of Felix Krull / Thomas Mann (1954)
Mann's last, funniest book takes on some of his biggest questions - are artists liars? Will decadence
destroy Europe? This is the most heavenly, scandalous and saucy way of finding out the answers.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Fathers and Sons / Ivan Turgenev (1862)
Hunger / Knut Hamsun (1890)
Zeno's Conscience / Italo Svevo (1923)
Embers / Sandor Marai (1942)
The Coming of Age / Simone De Beauvoir (1970)
Death in Venice / Thomas Mann (1912)
The Leopard / Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1958)
Life and Fate / Vasily Grossman (1959)
Perfume / Patrick Suskind (1985)
Blindness / Jose Saramago (1995)
BRITISH CLASSICS
Tom Jones / Henry Fielding (1749)
Joyous and irrepressible, bawdy and fast, Fielding's picaresque adventure is short on moralising over
sexual liaisons, and long on a rich depiction of 18th-century life. Ceaselessly engaging and everlastingly
fresh.
Emma / Jane Austen (1815)
Of all Austen's heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most beguilingly flawed; and naturally, beneath the
comedy of disastrous match-making and snobbery, the narrative has a keen intelligence and finely
wrought moral sense that makes even a picnic on Box Hill seem universal.
Great Expectations / Charles Dickens (1860)
All that we associate with Dickens, from the large characters to the sense of social injustice, finds its
most perfect expression here: Pip's journey from blacksmith's boy to nouveau gentility is an elegy of
regret and nostalgia; and London and the windwhipped Thames estuary are unforgettably conjured.
What Maisie Knew / Henry James (1897)
Legal divorce came to England in 1857 and was still a rarity when 40 years later, James's novel told of a
young girl being shuttled between two ghastly separating parents. Bleak, yet perfectly formed.
Middlemarch / George Eliot (1874)
Eliot brought her formidable acuity to the evocation of a very particular time - the political reforms of
1832 - but she also pioneered a real depth of psychological understanding in her unforgiving depictions of
disintegrating love. Virginia Woolf described it as the only English novel "for grown-up people".
Tess of the d'Urbevilles / Thomas Hardy (1891)
There are times when Tess's rural Wessex has a medieval feel; but Hardy's tragedy of a wronged country
girl is also on another level about the painful onrush of modernity and industrialisation - a foreshadowing
of simple purity despoiled by capitalism.
Ulysses / James Joyce (1922)
Or: a day in the life of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, as they criss-cross Dublin on June 4, 1904.
Every word is pregnant with meaning, every character's thought conjured with precision, yet it is
brilliantly, consistently, laugh-outloud funny.
Mrs Dalloway / Virginia Woolf (1925)
Well-connected Clarissa Dalloway is to give a party later that evening; not far away, Septimus Smith, a
victim of shell shock, sits in Regent's Park, subject to hallucinations. Through their thoughts Woolf
addresses Society and the delicacy of sanity.
Lady Chatterley's Lover / D H Lawrence (1928)
The sex scenes and language are now inadvertently hilarious, but none of us were to know this until
1960, when the ban on this novel was lifted. Still startling, there is also another level here to do with
landscape, inheritance and war.
A Dance to the Music of Time / Anthony Powell (first volume, 1951, 12th volume 1975)
A fantastically ambitious and panoramic sequence detailing the lives and loves of various interlocking
mostly upper middle-class characters across the 20th century, it continues to draw in fresh enthusiasts.
I, Claudius / Robert Graves (1934)
Graves hit a rich seam with this imagining of the lost autobiography of Emperor Claudius. Lethal palace
intrigues, poisonings and sex, as well as satisfyingly complex relationships gives ancient Rome a vivid
new colour and energy.
At Swim-Two-Birds / Flann O'Brien (1939)
A book within a book within a book, a satirical evocation of 1930s Ireland, in which the characters write
about one another, and these various fictional figments gang up on the notional author.
The New Confessions / William Boyd (1987)
A sprawling picaresque aping the form of Rousseau's The Confessions, New Confessions follows John
James Todd from Edinburgh through the First World War to Berlin, Hollywood and then into exile on an
island in the Mediterranean. Surprising, engaging, often very funny, it is also ultimately rather moving.
A Clockwork Orange / Anthony Burgess (1962)
Young Alex loves Beethoven and ultraviolence, but the state thinks it has found a way to scientifically
purge him of evil. The real point of the book is the dazzling language - a blend of cockney, Russian and
Romany.
The Girls of Slender Means / Muriel Spark (1963)
Set in drab 1945 London, Spark's genius for conveying the flavour of a time, combined with the collision
between light-hearted youth and intimations of a heavier life to come, results in a story with an unusual
sweet-sour after-taste.
The Sea, The Sea / Iris Murdoch (1978)
A theatre director takes a house on the coast where he meets his former love and disastrously begins
wooing her afresh. Murdoch juggles philosophy with raw emotions and self-absorption and finds humour
in both.
Riders / Jilly Cooper (1985)
One of the greatest of guilty pleasures, Cooper's febrile Rutshire Chronicles started here: show jumping is
a backdrop to the extraordinary sexual dealings of the caddish Rupert Campbell-Black and the wealthy
English county set. Pure glitzy class porn, yet still weirdly moving.
The Sea / John Banville (2005)
A masterful exploration of memory, and of loss, Banville's Booker-winning novel focuses on an art
historian reaching back to the seaside years of his childhood, and of the people and experiences and
loves that have subsequently shaped the meaning of his life.
White Teeth / Zadie Smith (2000)
The most startling quality of Smith's precocious debut - a northwest London multiracial multigenerational saga - is the blend of extreme energy and stop-you-in-your-tracks psychological
observation. Immigration, the human genome, Kilburn, failed fathers, 1970s pubs and a Nazi too; the
genius lies in Smith's flair for making it all seem so natural, as well as so funny.
Wolf Hall / Hilary Mantel (2009)
There is the temptation to think of this extraordinary work as populist, even crowd-pleasing. But Mantel's
achievement runs deeper. In fictionalising Thomas Cromwell and the Henrician court, the deadly power
struggles and the most tender relationships, Mantel has reinvigorated not just a genre but the English
novel as a whole.
THE BEST OF THE REST
The Pilgrim's Progress / John Bunyan (1678)
Robinson Crusoe / Daniel Defoe (1719)
Clarissa / Samuel Richardson (1748)
Vanity Fair / William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
Bleak House / Charles Dickens (1852)
Cranford / Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)
Barchester Towers / Anthony Trollope (1857)
Howards End / EM Forster (1910)
Of Human Bondage / Somerset Maugham (1915)
The Forsyte Saga / John Galsworthy (1922)
Living / Henry Green (1929)
Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys (1968)
Quartet in Autumn / Barbara Pym (1977)
Lanark: A Life in Four Books / Alasdair Gray (1981)
Money / Martin Amis (1984)
LATIN AMERICAN CLASSICS
The Time of the Hero / Mario Vargas Llosa (1963)
The debut novel of the experimental writer sometimes described as "the national conscience of Peru",
this story of teenage boys at a military academy has shades of Lord of the Flies. The outraged academy
authorities burned 1,000 copies on publication.
Rayuela / Julio Cortazar (1963)
Pablo Neruda said that those who do not read this great Argentinean author are suffering from "a serious
invisible disease". This ludic, meandering and multipleended "counter-novel" - whose title translates as
"Hopscotch" - is about lovers who refuse to make arrangements.
One Hundred Years of Solitude / Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1967)
Dreamily exploring Colombian myths and history through the magical, multigenerational story of the
Buendia family. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, William Kennedy declared the novel should
be required reading for the human race. Print out the family tree before you start or you'll get lost.
The Power and the Glory / Graham Greene (1940)
In Greene's masterpiece, a nameless Roman Catholic whiskey priest goes on the run in 1930s Mexico
during the Red Shirts' persecution of the clergy. As he exchanges sacred rites for sanctuary, the vultures
look down on him with "shabby indifference".
The Motorcycle Diaries / Ernesto Che Guevara (published 1993)
Leaving Argentina for a lark on a sputtering motorbike, the young Marxist revolutionary returns as a man
with a mission. He becomes, in his daughter's words: "increasingly sensitive to the complex indigenous
world of Latin America".
The Labyrinth of Solitude / Octavio Paz (1950)
"Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition," writes the Mexican poet in this celebrated
collection of essays. "Man is nostalgia and a search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of
himself he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude."
The House of the Spirits / Isabel Allende (1982)
Beginning life as a letter to her dying, 100-year-old grandfather, the Peruvian-born novelist's debut is a
history of Chile told as a family saga through the female line. "At five," she has said, "I was already a
feminist but nobody used the word in Chile yet."
The Alchemist / Paulo Coelho (1988)
Holding the Guinness World Record for the most translated book by a living author, this Brazilian-born
author's allegorical novel follows a youthful Andalusian shepherd's journey to Egypt. When you want
something badly enough, he is told, then you can make it happen.
The Savage Detectives / Roberto Bolano (1998)
Born in Santiago in 1953 - "the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died," he wrote - dyslexic Bolano lived
a fractured, wanderer's life which may have fed into his playful, non-linear fiction. The poet-hero of his
masterpiece is called Ulises.
Like Water for Chocolate / Laura Esquivel (1989)
"Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves," writes
Esquivel in this sumptuous, magical realist Mexican melodrama. The heroine Tita's emotions spill into the
delicious food she prepares.
THE BEST OF THE REST
The President / Miguel Angel Asturias (1946)
Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo (1955)
The Death of Artemio Cruz / Carlos Fuentes (1962)
Labyrinths / Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
I, the Supreme / Augusto Roa Bastos (1974)
CLASSICS FROM ANTIQUITY
The Iliad / Homer (c775BC)
The theme is war, for sure, but really it's the wrath of Achilles, and what it's like to work with an unstable
killing machine. Each death is separately crafted; the gods mourn their favourites; and even Achilles can
show us how to act with dignity.
The Odyssey / Homer (c725BC)
Here is Odysseus, returning from the war. But this is a poem less about travel and monsters than it is
about identity - how the wily hero disguises himself even among his family. This is conflict on a domestic
scale.
Metamorphoses / Ovid (8AD)
The Metamorphoses are all over the walls of the National Gallery. This was the most read book of Latin
from the Renaissance onwards, and its tales of transformation, punishments fair or unfair, and the
mythical roots of the universe, shape our aesthetic outlook even now.
The Symposium / Plato (c385-380BC)
This is Greek prose writing at its best. A dialogue about love at a party that the handsome Alcibiades
crashes is deliberately drunken and confusing, to show that no one, not even Socrates, can say what love
is.
The Art of Love / Ovid (2AD)
Men - how can you woo women and keep them?Women - how can you impress men and stop them
wearing your clothes? Ovid's tips on love are sometimes classy, occasionally crass, but always revealing
about the intricacies of Roman living and loving.
Phaedo / Plato (c385 - 380BC)
The death of Socrates is enormously moving for the tremendous calm he shows. He claims this is
because he will see the world beyond this one, where things assume their perfect forms. And yet this is a
powerfully human portrait of Socrates from his student.
The Symposium / Xenophon (360BC)
This other Symposium is notable not for its philosopohical rigour, but for the way in which Socrates turns
into Dr Johnson. "What should we eat?" "Onions." "Why?" "Our wives won't think anyone would snog us."
"So what is the best perfume?" Etc.
Poems / Sappho (born c612BC)
This won't take long - many of the poems contained in her nine books have been lost or destroyed - but
what survives is stunning - intimate, utterly original and wise. Anne Carson's edition, If Not, Winter, is a
perfect place to start.
Parallel Lives / Plutarch (before AD120)
Plutarch composed these detailed portraits of Greek and Roman greats long after the events, but scholars
find him staggeringly well informed. It's also amazing to note how many images in Shakespeare's Roman
plays are really Plutarch's.
The Aeneid / Virgil (19BC)
The tale of Trojans founding Rome goes far beyond propaganda (although it's there). Virgil is the master
of pathos, commemorating victims more than victories. And the failed romance between Aeneas and Dido
is the ancient world's best love story.
The Confessions / Saint Augustine (AD398)
As St Augustine struggles excitingly with temptation, one of the most tempting things for him is the
Classical world itself, so rich in the rhetoric he would use for his own preaching, but with which he would
bid the ancients goodbye.
On the Nature of Things / Lucretius (before 55BC)
Lucretius leaned on the Greek philosophers to create this investigation into how the universe works: it is
run by atoms, can you believe, and gods are disinterested. Lucretius can write sensually as well as
entertainingly.
Works and Days / Hesiod (after 750BC)
Many of the myths of ancient Greece that seem so natural to us now first appear in Hesiod - for example,
how the gods appeared. In Works and Days he is more down to earth, advising on agriculture, but not
before he's offered a frank assessment of mankind from golden age to iron.
The Histories / Herodotus (c450-420BC)
Was the father of history even a historian? He did recount the events of the war against Persia, to rally
the Greeks once more, but the anecdotes, sketches of other cultures, and his accounts of mummification
suggest he's something more interesting still.
The Georgics / Virgil (29BC)
"The best poem by the best poet" in Latin, said the 17th-century English poet John Dryden, and he was
completely right. Virgil picks up on Hesiod's advice for farmers, but knows better how to structure his
work, and his range of language helps him to treat the earth as a living organism.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Odes / Pindar (from 498BC)
The Apology / Plato (c385-380BC)
A History of Rome / Livy (before 17AD)
On behalf of Caelius / Cicero (56BC)
Pumpkinification / attributed to Seneca (before 65AD)
The Civil War / Lucan (before 65AD)
The Satires / Juvenal (before early 2AD)
Daphnis and Chloe / Longus (2AD)
Metamorphoses / Apuleius (2AD)
The Politics / Aristotle (before 323BC)
ROMANCE
Les Liaisons Dangereuses / Choderlos de Laclos (1782)
The self-made and sexually cynical Marquise de Merteuil and arrogant Vicomte de Valmont play a cruel
game with a pure young woman in this tense epistolery novel driven by lust, power, seduction and
revenge. A wicked and sophisticated treat.
Pride and Prejudice / Jane Austen (1813)
This perennially delightful romantic comedy gives us timeless lovers and sly social satire. "You could not
shock her more than she shocks me," wrote WH Auden, who thrilled to read the "English spinster of the
middle class/Describe the amorous effects of 'brass'".
Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte (1847)
"I will be myself." the passionate and moral governess tells her saturnine employer. "Mr Rochester, you
must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get
it of you."
Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte (1847)
Disdained on publication for its "vulgar depravity" and difficult characters, even the sniffier early critics
acknowledge the "rugged power" of the romance between Catherine Earnshaw, and adopted gypsy
Heathcliff with whom she feels a love eternal as the rocks beneath the moor.
Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert (1856)
A kindly but unexceptional provincial doctor marries a woman whose expectations have been raised
unrealistically by reading too many romantic novels and, perhaps inevitably, things end badly.
The Portrait of a Lady / Henry James (1881)
On his deathbed, Isabel Archer's cousin Ralph gasps, "Love remains. I don't know why we should suffer
so much. Perhaps I shall find out." But readers still argue over the nature of her affection for her cruel
and oppressive husband.
A Room with a View / EM Forster (1908)
Amurder in an Italian piazza and an unexpected kiss in a field of violets shake muddled Lucy
Honeychurch out of her repressed middle-class life in Surrey. Forster, says Zadie Smith, allows the
English comic novel to exist "as a messy human concoction".
Le Grand Meaulnes / Alain-Fournier (1913)
A recent poll of French readers placed Fournier's novel sixth of all 20th-century books, just behind Proust
and Camus. Julian Barnes called this nostalgic tale of lost adolescent love: "magical, high-hearted, yet
never sentimental".
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept / Elizabeth Smart (1945)
Loosely based on the Canadian author's destructive, 18-year affair with the British poet George Barker,
during which she bore him four of his 15 children, Angela Carter reviewed this astonishing, infuriating
prose poem as "Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning".
Gone with the Wind / Margaret Mitchell (1936)
So hefty that its vintage erotica-aficionado author used parts of her manuscript to prop up the couch on
which she wrote, this Pulitzer Prize winning CivilWar epic pits flouncing Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara
against the "dark sexuality" of roguish Rhett Butler.
Love in a Cold Climate / Nancy Mitford (1949)
When the remote and lovely Polly returns from India and reveals she wants to marry her lecherous uncle
she sets the cat among the inter-war, upper-class pigeons in this deliciously sharp and funny novel, a
companion piece to The Pursuit of Love.
The End of the Affair / Graham Greene (1951)
"Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems
better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust," writes Greene in this novel of agonisingly
restrained passion, set amid the shattered stained glass of wartime London.
Oscar and Lucinda / Peter Carey (1988)
A Devon vicar's son bets the woman he loves that he can build her a glass church in the Australian
outback. Jonathan Miller once described this vivid, Booker Prizewinning novel as "a sort of science fiction
set in the past".
Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternak (1957)
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (incensing the Communist Party which had refused its publication
in the USSR) Pasternak's tale of a rich industrialist's son who embraces the revolution takes a dark turn
when the woman he loves is exiled.
Norwegian Wood / Haruki Murakami (1987)
Roughly five per cent of the Japanese population bought a copy of Murakami's haunting and original
debut novel, in which 37-year-old ToruWatanabe (a man neither uchi or soto - inside or outside - of his
milieu) hears a song which recalls a formative college encounter.
Atonement / Ian McEwan (2001)
In the heatwave of 1935, Robbie Turner accidentally sends his benefactor's daughter an explicit letter via
her sister Briony, who later implicates Robbie in a crime. And Briony is "possessed by a desire to have
the world just so".
Bonjour Tristesse / Francoise Sagan (1954)
Written when Sagan was just 17, this sultry, lyrical novel captures the confusion of a girl on the cusp of
adulthood, meddling with others' romantic affairs with disastrous consequences.
The Swimming-Pool Library / Alan Hollinghurst (1988)
Hollinghurst's beautifully controlled and sexually explicit debut is 25-year-old William Beckwith's account
of summer 1983, during which he was "riding high on sex and self-esteem". Cruising in a public lavatory,
he saves the life of an octogenarian peer.
The Remains of the Day / Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
Seeking a recognisable English myth, Ishiguro chose the English butler, saying Jeeves was a big
influence. But Salman Rushdie notes that "death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouseworld". And the butler wants the former housekeeper back.
The Well of Loneliness / Radclyffe Hall (1928)
A pioneering lesbian novel, in which an upper-class "invert" falls for another woman, judged obscene
because it promoted lesbianism although the only sexual reference is: "that night, they were not
divided".
THE BEST OF THE REST
Women in Love / DH Lawrence (1920)
The Blue Flower / Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)
The Go-Between / LP Hartley (1953)
Death in Venice / Thomas Mann (1912)
The Graduate / Charles Webb (1963)
The French Lieutenant's Woman / John Fowles (1969)
The Far Pavilions / MM Kaye (1978)
The Piano Teacher / Elfriede Jelinek (1983)
Foreign Affairs / Alison Lurie (1984)
The Lover / Marguerite Duras (1984)
The Passion / Jeanette Winterson (1987)
Possession / AS Byatt (1990)
The English Patient / Michael Ondaatje (1992)
Music & Silence / RoseTremain (1999)
The Reader / Bernhard Schlink (1995)
MONEY AND POWER
The Art of War / Sun Tzu (4BC)
Beloved of Bond villains,Mafiosi and business leaders worldwide, you have to read this if only to be able
to start a sentence "Sun Tzu says..." and finish it with something sound. Spying and deception are the
keys to victory.
The Prince / Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)
Like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli is more often quoted than read, which is a shame, since although his name has
become an adjective for the acceptance of the necessity of immoral acts for the accomplishment of one's
aims, there is more to it than that.
The Wealth of Nations / Adam Smith (1776)
What would Adam "The invisible hand of market forces" Smith say about the Libor scandal? This is the
first enquiry into the division of labour, productivity and the freedom of the market.
Of the Social Contract / Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
"Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains."Why should this be? This is Rousseau's magnum opus,
an investigation into the legitimate - or otherwise - power of kings over their peoples.
Das Kapital / Karl Marx (1867)
Marx's book reveals the mechanisms by which capitalists fix the means of the production and the markets
for their own benefit. If only everybody did not want to be one of these capitalists, then this would have
been even more influential.
The General Theory of Employment / John Maynard Keynes (1936)
Central to Keynes's theory is the idea unemployment will be low if money is spent, high if it is not.
Therefore spend money. But where does that money come from? Borrow it. In the long term we are all
dead.
Atlas Shrugged / Ayn Rand (1957)
Set in a dystopian future, Ayn Rand's sprawling, slightly crazed novel champions unfettered greed by
showing how awful life would be for us all if people were not rewarded for their productivity.
The Ascent of Money / Niall Ferguson (2008)
Ferguson's book on the history of money from the Babylonian clay tablets missed out on the most recent
disasters, but this is a solid and finely crafted piece of scholarship charting and explaining all previous
booms and busts.
Who Moved my Cheese? / Dr Spencer Johnson (1998)
Good question. It is actually a best selling book about adapting to change to find and keep happiness,
couched in a rather charming allegory involving two super mice and a couple of dozy humans stuck in a
maze, seeking their share of the cheese.
Whoops! / John Lanchester (2010)
For a summary of what we knew had gone wrong with the financial markets (not including all the other
stuff we've since discovered), there can be no better guide. Short, pithy, even jokey, it will inspire futile
rage.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Leviathan / Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Freakonomics / Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner (2005)
Capitalism and Freedom / Milton Friedman (1962)
The Road to Serfdom / Frederick Hayek (1994))
The Great Crash of 1929 / John Kenneth Galbraith (1954)
POETRY
The Selected Poems of Li Po / Li Po (c750 AD)
Remarkable for their succinctness and apparently throw-away insights, these poems delighted their
Chinese readers in the 8th century and, in the hands of various interpreters in the 20th, such as Ezra
Pound, brought new life to English poetry (as well as to Mahler).
Sonnets / William Shakespeare (1609)
These are considered the best sonnets ever, and the best love poems ever. The poet puts his craft to
situations that call for all his musicality and reason; the results attain a kind of perfection.
Paradise Lost / John Milton (1667)
The brainiest poet to write in English could somehow wrench the language around and still make it speak
in sonorous, memorable cadences: his ambition in Paradise Lost is breathtaking, but so is the fact that he
delivered.
Lyrical Ballads / William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)
This collaboration set out to change poetry, and while it remains easy to mock, the authors pulled it off.
If elaborate, over-fussy classical references seem out of place next to more straightforward observations
and tales, Lyrical Ballads heralded the change.
Don Juan / Lord Byron (1819 - 1824)
For all Byron's reputation as the great Romantic, he was actually devoted to clever jokes and attacks on
his peers worthy of Alexander Pope for their smartness. Don Juan is a triumph of this style: a narrative
following a journal on which trouble is the only predictable thing.
Eugene Onegin / Alexander Pushkin (1825)
Pushkin's masterpiece is a novel in verse, about love badly timed, rivalries and loneliness - but with
highly entertaining digressions and vibrant characters. (Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate is a joyous
narrative poem about San Francisco in the same form.)
The Man with Night Sweats / Thom Gunn (1992)
Gunn brought a diction and smartness to 20th-century poetry that recalled the Metaphysicals such as
John Donne. The grim theme of his penultimate collection almost demanded it: the impact of HIV and
Aids on the gay community he had hymned in earlier books.
Leaves of Grass / Walt Whitman (1855)
It took a while for America to realise how vital Whitman's exuberant, potent and frank outpourings would
be to its national identity. His status is now secure, and at least Whitman himself never doubted it.
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson / Emily Dickinson (pub 1890 onwards, posthumously)
Emily Dickinson spent much of her life at home in Amherst, but also in a kind of ecstasy: her tiny but
explosive poems dazzle with colour, alongside insights into fame, mortality and the soul. Her work
became more known when her sister discovered it after her death.
The Waste Land / TS Eliot (1922)
Eliot changed poetry for ever when he drew on his personal pain to account for the wreckage that was
Europe after the Great War. His mishmash of styles, voices and references are seductive and clever, but
pointed to the cultural problems he identified.
Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems / Allen Ginsberg (1961)
Perhaps more than Howl, Kaddish is Ginsberg's intense, intimate confession. It is a harrowing account of
his mother's death, and decline yields to an exultant version of the Jewish prayer for the dead.
Birthday Letters / Ted Hughes (1998)
Throughout his life, Hughes said nothing about his marriage to Sylvia Plath until these poems. A memoir
of a relationship that could be sustaining as well as troubled.
Dart / Alice Oswald (2002)
Dart follows the river from Dartmoor to Dartmouth, and is steeped in the voices of people whose lives are
vitally linked to it. The result gives the river life, too, as it finds and loses its own identity.
Family Values / Wendy Cope (2011)
In perhaps her best collection to date, Cope balances her observations of present quirks (such as
eccentrics who go to concerts) with memories of her childhood and family. Readers will welcome the
warmth and simplicity of her love poems, too.
The Divine Comedy / Dante (1308 -1321)
Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise is sometimes startling, sometimes even grotesque
but it teaches us about divine love, and human love, and gives us a lesson in the use of striking imagery
and symbolism.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Songs and Sonnets / John Donne (1633)
Faust I and II / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808, 1832)
Les Fleurs du Mal / Charles Baudelaire (1857; 1861)
Selected Poems / John Clare (published posthumously)
Montage of a Dream Deferred / Langston Hughes (1951)
Station Island / Seamus Heaney (1984)
Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair / Pablo Neruda (1924)
The Golden Gate / Vikram Seth (1986)
Selected Poems / Yehuda Amichai (2000)
White Egrets / Derek Walcott (2010)
THRILLERS
The Secret Agent / Joseph Conrad (1907)
Although written more than 100 years ago there is something timely about what is arguably Conrad's
most enduring novel, which sees his secret agent embroiled in a plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory
on behalf of - perhaps - a group of anarchists. It absolutely predicts the rise of terrorism.
The Manchurian Candidate / Richard Condon (1959)
Set during the Cold War, The Manchurian Candidate concerns the brainwashing of a whole company of
soldiers by Korean Communists, to allow their officer to become a "sleeper" in the American Government.
Complex and steeped in the paranoia of the time.
The Hunt for Red October / Tom Clancy (1984)
At the height of the ColdWar the captain of a Russian nuclear submarine that cannot be detected defects
to the west, bringing his craft - Red October - with him. The Russians try to stop him. The Americans and
the hero Jack Ryan try to stop them. Incredibly tense and superbly claustrophobic.
Killing Floor / Lee Child (1997)
When ex-army loner Jack Reacher gets off a bus in a one-horse town in the American South he is
instantly arrested and charged with murdering his own brother. But boy have they picked the wrong man
to pick on...
On Her Majesty's Secret Service / Ian Fleming (1963)
It might almost have been any of them, but Fleming's tenth Bond book reveals the spy in a softer, more
humane light, even falling in love and getting married - though not for long - while battling with Ernst
Blofield in his high alpine fastness.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold / John le Carre (1963)
"What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?" No! They are, among other things, vain fools
and le Carre's third novel, a marvellously bleak take on the Cold War, shows them at their morally
repugnant worst.
Where Eagles Dare / Alistair MacLean (1967)
MacLean wrote the novel at the same time as the screenplay (which was to be made into the greatest
war film of all time) and it is the best of his many; full of ferocious action, double-crossing spies and fist
fights on cable cars. Top stuff.
The Andromeda Strain / Michael Crichton (1969)
Crichton's first novel under his own name was a huge success and became a blueprint for the many
technothrillers that followed. His technique was to find something people were frightened about, then
make it worse, in this case organisms from out of space that would wipe out mankind.
Carrie / Stephen King (1974)
Concerning a high school girl who uses her recently discovered telekinetic powers to punish class bullies,
this is King's first of more than 50 novels and, written in an unusual style including through letters and
newspaper articles, it still packs an immediate and terrifying punch.
Marathon Man / William Goldman (1974)
This has got everything: New York Jews, diamonds, brotherly betrayal, a beautiful girl, properly evil Nazis
and sadistic dentists. Goldman was better known for his screenplays, but this novel - taut and laconic shows how thrillers should be written.
The Bourne Identity / Robert Ludlum (1980)
When a bullet wounded man is washed ashore, barely alive and with no memory, so begins an artful
reconstruction of the past, and though it has since spawned numerous overlymuscular films, the original
novel is full of satisfying intrigue.
Jaws / Peter Benchley (1974)
When a huge shark starts eating people from off a Long Island beach resort, the police chief takes it
personally, but the mayor wants it hushed up. An epic contest ensues.
The World at Night / Alan Furst (1996)
Alan Furst's novels are all similar - Paris, 1940, a man, a woman, the German army - and the one you
read first is the one you like the most. He is a wonderful scene setter, able to conjure a time and place
and an atmosphere with a few adroitly chosen words.
The Da Vinci Code / Dan Brown (2003)
Panned by the critics, The Da Vinci Code is nevertheless the most brilliant page turner, with a hook and a
cliff-hanger on every other page so you plough on through, desperate for the end.
The Thirty-Nine Steps / John Buchan (1915)
Both plot and hero may be archetypal but there is plenty of "period" excitement and the atmosphere
crackles with restrained menace.
THE BEST OF THE REST
The Count of Monte Cristo / Alexandre Dumas (1844)
The Riddle of the Sands / Erskine Childers (1903)
The Scarlet Pimpernel / Baroness Orczy (1905)
The Third Man and other stories / Graham Greene (1949)
The Day of the Jackal / Frederick Forsyth (1971)
Not After Midnight - Five Long Stories / Daphne Du Maurier (1971)
Gorky Park / Martin Cruz Smith (1981)
A Time to Kill / John Grisham (1989)
Los Alamos / Joseph Kanon (1997)
Gone Girl / Gillian Flynn (2012)
FOOD AND DRINK
Fast Food Nation / Eric Schlosser (2001)
Although it may taste that way, not all food is good, and fast food - burgers and fries - is particularly bad,
not just for you, but for the planet. Schlosser's book shows how the industry destroys the environment
and workers' lives, and aims its products at children.
French Country Cooking / Elizabeth David (1951)
Anyone alive in England in the 1950s will tell you they had to buy olive oil from the chemist, but this was
the book that began to change all that, introducing us to food as pleasure and forever turning us from
brown Windsor soup.
How to Eat / Nigella Lawson (1998)
It seems ages ago now that Nigella was new on the scene, fresh-faced and full of sensible advice about
"the pleasures and principles of good food" instead of wearing unsuitable negligees while raiding the
fridge for ice cream at midnight, but this is her at her best.
The Physiology of Taste / Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1825)
For someone said to have founded the lo-carb diet 150 years before its time (again), the father of the
gastronomic essay took a hard line on cheese: "A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with
only one eye." Full of strong views, it is a deserved classic.
The Man Who Ate Everything / Jeffrey Steingarten (1997)
Part cook book, part travelogue, part scientific inquiry, Steingarten's book is collected from his Vogue
columns and answers some of those idle questions such as why the French do not drop like flies from all
the butter they eat.
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break / Steven Sherrill (2000)
The Minotaur works as a short order chef in a rib restaurant somewhere in the American South, keeping
himself to himself, watching life go by and taking the occasional fag break. A beautiful, heartbreaking,
startling novel about food and love as well as mythological monsters.
The Omnivore's Dilemma / Michael Pollan (2006)
Before refrigeration we had to eat what was there, but now we can eat more or less what we like when
we like, and centuries of cultural conditioning have come undone. What does this mean? Pollan is a
fascinating writer with a rigorous enquiring mind.
The Kitchen Diaries, volume I + II / Nigel Slater (2006, 2012)
In two chunky beautifully produced volumes Nigel Slater charts his food highlights of the year. Seasonal,
fresh ingredients - often picked from his own garden - with lots of butter and salt, his recipes will have
anyone salivating.
Kitchen Confidential / Anthony Bourdain (2000)
In wonderfully salty prose Bourdain describes how he came to find himself working in the netherworld of
the restaurant kitchen, a space populated by deviants and borderline lunatics with no time for niceties.
Required reading for anyone who eats out.
Thai Food / David Thompson (2002)
The quintessential cookery book that covers not just one great cuisine, but in doing so the cultural and
social history of a country. From simple street food to more complex dishes, this has everything you need
to know.
BEST OF THE REST
Hangover Square / Patrick Hamilton (1941)
Delia Smith's Cookery Course / Delia Smith (1995)
A Long Finish / Michael Dibdin (1998)
Sichuan Cookery / Fuchsia Dunlop (2001)
Judgement of Paris / George Taber (2006)
CRIME
The Woman in White / Wilkie Collins (1859)
"Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but
they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them," wrote Collins in the first great
Victorian thriller.
Strangers on a Train / Patricia Highsmith (1950)
The perfect murder is surely the one a sane person has no motive to commit. That's the premise of this
tense and morally disturbing noir masterpiece in which two men become "what the other had not chosen
to be, the cast-off self".
The Daughter of Time / Josephine Tey (1951)
Unusually topical with the rediscovery of Richard III's bones, Josephine Tey's novel starts with a police
inspector bored in hospital re-imagining the last Yorkist king, trying to work out whether he killed the
princes in the Tower or not. The conclusion remains controversial, in some parts.
The Complete Sherlock Holmes / Arthur Conan Doyle (1892-1927)
The drug-addicted, violin-playing ex-prize fighter is the only mystery that never gets solved in these
original, deliciously engineered and atmospheric detective stories set in "that great cesspool into which all
the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained".
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd / Agatha Christie (1926)
Slippery red herrings meet smug little grey cells in this ingenious, rule-breaking country house murder
mystery, Christie's masterpiece was inspired by her brother-in-law who suggested that the ideal fictional
criminal would be a Dr Watson character.
The Madman of Bergerac / Georges Simenon (1932)
Literature's most dogged detective, Commissaire Maigret, is en route to a restful rural weekend when the
peculiar behaviour of a fellow train passenger arouses his curiosity and leads him to a quaint French
country village terrorised by a homicidal maniac.
The Nine Tailors / Dorothy L Sayers (1934)
With a flawless English and dry humour that helps make her the most literary of the Golden Age mystery
writers, Sayers' ninth novel featuring the crime-solving toff Lord Peter Wimsey is her most ingenious.
Church bells chime spookily across remote Fen country.
Rebecca / Daphne du Maurier (1938)
A childlike young woman with lank hair marries a mysterious and dominating older man and becomes
dangerously obsessed with his charismatic - but deceased - first wife. Psychologically acute, the novel
was described by Germaine Greer as "a superior example of deeply encoded female pornography".
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow / Peter Hoeg (1992)
At the vanguard of what has since become a Scandinavian crime tsunami, Hoeg's unusual and gripping
novel follows Miss Smilla's investigation into whether a boy was pushed or fell from a roof in
Copenhagen. The clues take her to Greenland via what must be one of the most peculiar sex scenes in
detective history.
In Cold Blood / Truman Capote (1966)
Seven years after publishing Breakfast at Tiffany's, Capote published this sensational "non-fiction novel"
about the senseless and brutal murder of a Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their children. Based on
interviews with the appalled community and the killers, the book reinvented reportage.
The Name of the Rose / Umberto Eco (1980)
"Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told," writes the
Italian philosopher in his postmodernist debut novel about murder in a 14th-century monastery. It is the
scholarly reader's answer to The Da Vinci Code.
The New York Trilogy / Paul Auster (1985-86)
Sly postmodernist sleuthing in this profound, literary quest which sends its author on a search for the
meaning of self and the origins of language. "Every life is inexplicable," writes the author, "No matter
how many facts are told."
Misery / Stephen King (1987)
Inspired by King's resentment of readers who wanted him shackled to the horror genre, this
bloodcurdling thriller sees novelist Paul Sheldon imprisoned and tortured by his "Number One Fan". The
real fear though is that of every novelist: the blank, bloodless page.
The Big Sleep / Raymond Chandler (1939)
The cool master of hardboiled crime fiction sends PI Philip Marlowe into a murky web of murder,
blackmail and pornography, while "under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without
sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness".
LA Confidential / James Ellroy (1990)
The sprawling and violent third novel in the self-proclaimed "Mad Dog" of American crime fiction's
thrilling, voyeuristic LA quartet sees three cops - with varying degrees of attachment to justice and the
law - sucked down a drain of "astounding audacious perversion''.
Fatherland / Robert Harris (1992)
In this outstanding example of speculative fiction, Harris imagines that Hitler won the Second World War
and, by the 1960s, Britain is a client state ruled by King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis. Meanwhile, a
detective in Berlin examines a corpse which stinks of conspiracy, but that is only the beginning of the
truths waiting to be unearthed.
True History of the Kelly Gang / Peter Carey (2000)
The bushranger turned bank robber gets a voice "like a steel nibbed kookaburra on the fences in the
morning sun" in Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel. Never flinching from the extreme violence, Carey
gives a rich emotional life to a national legend.
Fingersmith / Sarah Waters (2002)
Updating the decadent thrills of the Victorian melodrama for the 21st century, Waters' daringly plotted,
erotically charged and exquisitely detailed novel is as sly as its heroine.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher / Kate Summerscale (2009)
In 1860, the body of three-year-old Saville Kent was thrust into the servants' lavatory of his father's
country house. His throat had been slashed. In this insightful reconstruction, Summerscale turns the
spotlight on the moral hypocrisy surrounding the case.
Get Shorty / Elmore Leonard (1990)
A loan shark attempts to make it big in Hollywood in this witty thriller loaded with Leonard's trademark
whip-smart dialogue. Martin Amis once said his prose "makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy".
THE BEST OF THE REST
Tales of Mystery and Imagination / Edgar Allan Poe (1852)
The Innocence of Father Brown / G K Chesterton (1911)
The Thin Man / Dashiell Hammett (1934)
True Grit / Charles Portis (1968)
The Hollow Man / John Dickson Carr (1935)
Nineteen Seventy-Four / David Peace (1999)
The Godfather / Mario Puzo (1969)
The Watchmen / Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987)
A Dark-Adapted Eye / Barbara Vine (1986)
Devices and Desires / P D James (1989)
The Fifth Woman / Henning Mankell (1996)
My Name is Red / Orhan Pamuk (1998)
The Remorseful Day / Colin Dexter (1999)
The Girl Who Played with Fire / Stieg Larsson (2006)
The Journalist and the Murderer / Janet Malcolm (1990)
COMEDY
Gargantua and Pantagruel / Francois Rabelais (c 1532)
A series of rambunctious novels blending mad vulgarity with slingshot satire, Gargantua and Pantagruel is
a family saga involving giants and their adventures - swallowing pilgrims after they've fallen onto their
salad plates, battles with flying pigs that excrete mustard, and broad rudeness about the Church.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman / Laurence Sterne (1759-1767)
In many ways, one of the most influential novels - as far as it can be described as a novel - of all time.
An infinity of digressions is turned into a fine comic art form, and Sterne seems to invent postmodernism
200 years before anyone else gets there.
The Diary of a Nobody / George Grossmith and Weeden Grossmith (1888-1889)
Charles Pooter - with his absurdly earnest chronicle of the vagaries of everyday life in Upper Holloway long ago earned the accolade of the suffix 'esque'; and this late Victorian masterpiece has never been out
of print. It was originally written for Punch. It's also pretty wonderful social history.
Three Men in a Boat / Jerome K Jerome (1889)
Both a work of comic delight, following the titular three friends as they sail down the Thames, as well as
an evocation of willow-trailed waters and grassgreen river banks. It still touches those essential nerves:
comedy concerning food, hypochondria and dogs, plus messing about in boats.
Queen Lucia / E F Benson (1920)
More acidic than PG Wodehouse's sunny creations, this is the first of the Mapp and Lucia novels in which
the two women engage in devious and brilliantly funny battles for social supremacy in the idyllic seaside
town of Tilling (based on Rye, in Sussex). But Benson was fondly forgiving of his comic monsters and
their friends.
Cold Comfort Farm / Stella Gibbons (1932)
That rare thing: a satire that seems to have lasted better than its targets, among them DH Lawrence,
and the serious source material of the now all but forgotten novelist Mary Webb. This earthy saga of
Sussex rural life with Ada Doom, and the Starkadders including the lustful Seth, and the Church of the
Quivering Brethren as experienced by the 19-year-old outsider Flora Poste continues to appeal to fresh
generations.
The Code of the Woosters / PG Wodehouse (1938)
The finest of all Wodehouse's work: an exquisitely structured farce involving an antique silver cow
creamer, a policeman's helmet, drippy Madeleine, hellhound Sir Watkyn Bassett, Mosley wannabe
Roderick Spode, Wooster's indefatigable Aunt Dahlia, and an aggressive dog called Bartholomew.
The Loved One / Evelyn Waugh (1948)
Notable not least because Waugh was horrified by its success in America, this is a satirical, sick tale of
English poets and the American death industry, as represented by the Happy Glades cemetery and the
mortician Mr Joyboy. It was inspired following Waugh's sojourn in Hollywood, failing to adapt his novel
Brideshead Revisited.
Molesworth / Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (1953)
English literature is not short of memorable schools, but the chronicles of life at St Custard's, as observed
by the laconic Nigel Molesworth in a series of assertive and terribly spelled essays, are easily the
funniest. As well as giving us the phrase "as any fule kno", the stories also brought forth the exquisite
Basil Fotherington Thomas.
Lucky Jim / Kingsley Amis (1954)
Amis was lumped in with the playwrights and novelists of the "Angry Young Men" movement of the
Fifties; but unlike humourless John Osborne, this acutely observed comedy of sex and second-class
university life is a bellow of hilarious bile. Still beloved for its set-pieces: Jim Dixon forced to endure an
afternoon of madrigal singing, an occasion when drink is seemingly the only answer.
Puckoon / Spike Milligan (1963)
Although some of Milligan's other works are not universally loved, Puckoon - set in a fictional Irish village
in 1924 - endures. As the country is divided between north and south, the village is absurdly cut in half,
leading to chaos, satirical points and a feast of Joycean jokes.
The Bottle Factory Outing / Beryl Bainbridge (1974)
Bainbridge's distinctive comic voice has so much discomforting truth that many found it too dark; here,
lonely Freda and Brenda work in an Italian wine-bottling concern, and dreams of romantic fulfilment are
pitched against the grotty reality of lecherous men and bedsit life.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams (1979)
Adams was hitchhiking through Europe when he came up with the idea for this book, and the result is a
beautifully inventive blend of Monty Python and Isaac Asimov - a teeming universe of absurdity,
singularity and satirical philosophy, where planets are demolished to make way for galactic motorways.
The Commitments / Roddy Doyle (1987)
A rich comic fusion of band life, teenage yearnings for pop stardom and a snapshot of the decaying heart
of Dublin, this is the book that made Doyle's name. The wannabe band manager is Jimmy Rabbitte,
determined to bring soul music to Ireland, and the band gets its name because in the 1960s, all bands
had to have a 'The'.
Bridget Jones's Diary / Helen Fielding (1996)
Originally a newspaper column, Jones's adventures - punctuated with her faithful recording of cigarettes,
calories and alcoholic units consumed - was taken to define a generation. But for all the romantic farce
and sexual slapstick (if that is how we might term granny pants), the character has genuine humanity
and warmth; we can't help caring for her.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Decline and Fall / Evelyn Waugh (1928)
Thank You, Jeeves / P G Wodehouse (1934)
Pnin / Vladimir Nabokov (1957)
A Confederacy of Dunces / John Kennedy Toole (2006)
The Ascent of Rum Doodle / W E Bowman (1956)
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar / B J P Donleavy (1967)
Portnoy's Complaint / Philip Roth (1969)
Porterhouse Blue / Tom Sharpe (1974)
The History Man / Malcolm Bradbury (1975)
What a Carve Up! / Jonathan Coe (1994)
SCI-FI AND FANTASY
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde / Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Everybody thinks they know the split personality story, but Stevenson told associates he meant it as an
allegory. For what though? The id and the ego? The fall of man? Or quite simply the effects of alcohol?
Frankenstein / Mary Shelley (1818)
It took a while for Shelley's work to be taken seriously as literature, as opposed to imaginative blood and
thunder. But it is a brilliant commentary on the Romantic movement, and more frightening than any of
the films - especially at the novel's Arctic climax.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Lewis Carroll (1865)
It has been suggested that Alice's trippy experiences are Carroll's comment on his contemporary
mathematical theory: that all the growing and shrinking is about Euclidean geometry and that episodes
such as the caterpillar and the hookah are a send-up of symbolic algebra. Whatever the explanation, it
endures.
The War of the Worlds / H G Wells (1898)
Does the county of Surrey make quite enough of the fact that Wells's malevolent Martians first landed in
Woking? Or that the hideous creatures in their tripods laid waste to Walton-on-Thames? Like all immortal
science fiction, this is rooted in more earthly anxieties - here, belligerent European rival nations.
Dracula / Bram Stoker (1897)
Best enjoyed not as Gothic horror, but as a blazing late Victorian imperial adventure. Jonathan Harker
may initially travel to the Count's eerie fastness in Transylvania, but the Count is intent on some reverse
colonisation, coming to London and spreading his undead activities into the very heart of bourgeois
English society.
Titus Groan / Mervyn Peake (1946)
What must post-war readers have made of the denizens of Gormenghast? Of Lord Sepulchrave, Dr
Prunesquallor, Nanny Slagg, and Steerpike? What did all that rich and mad Gothic detailing portend? The
imagery remains unforgettable, not least Swelter's infernal kitchens, and Flay hurling a white cat at
Steerpike.
Brave New World / Aldous Huxley (1932)
Initially intended as a gentle send-up of H G Wells's utopian "things to come" visions, Huxley instead
conjured a nightmare 26th-century society of babies grown in "hatcheries", promiscuous casual sex
(marriage and families are obsolete) and hallucinogenic drugs. It is frequently pointed out that all such
things have come to pass.
1984 / George Orwell (1948)
Had Orwell written this one year earlier, we would have associated complete totalitarianism with the year
1974. As it is, Double-Think, Room 101 and the utterly harrowing betrayal of love are attached eternally
to every oppressive state regime. Orwell's warning is undying.
I, Robot / Isaac Asimov (1950)
A series of spacey stories chronicling the evolution of man's relationship with robots, and famous for
establishing the law that they cannot harm us. What they can do, however, is create tense philosophical
and ethical debates about the chasm between mind and machine, intention and consequence.
The Day of the Triffids / John Wyndham (1951)
A few years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this vivid horror story about a monstrous plant species
with lethal stingers played on our ecological fears. Wyndham was writing as postwar agriculture was
becoming a vast chemical-led industrial concern, and the Triffids were payback.
Lord of the Flies / William Golding (1954)
A boat-load of English boys are washed up on a desert island and have to create a self-governing society,
which starts off with the best of intentions but, as ever, human nature will out, and pretty soon they have
turned heaven into hell. A human version of Animal Farm.
Dune / Frank Herbert (1965)
A saga of off-world dynasties, harsh alien deserts, giant sandworms and an intricately worked-out
ecosystem, this sprawling work of imagination made sci-fi mainstream and inspired much environmental
thought.
High Rise / J G Ballard (1975)
In arguably his most resonant work, Ballard postulated a tower block that contained everything its
residents needed, from shops to pools to offices. They need never leave. And they don't. The internal
society begins to fragment, form classes, and savage civil war breaks out. It is a brilliantly unheimlich
urban parable.
The Colour of Magic / Terry Pratchett (1983)
The first Discworld novel introduces us to a universe populated by wizards, witches and Death himself. To
have these comic stories and gentle pastiches of Tolkien, and every myth and fairy tale, lapped up by 70
million readers is a spectacular achievement.
Nights at The Circus / Angela Carter (1984)
An extraordinarily vivid and sensual journey following the circus through 19th-century London and Russia
which brilliantly - and movingly - blurs the lines between acute psychological drama, fairy tale and
ancient myth.
The Handmaid's Tale / Margaret Atwood (1985)
Offred is a concubine in a future America where "handmaids" are used to provide children for sterile
upper-class women. A tale of institutionalised misogyny and biological tyranny that Atwood explained was
not exactly science fiction.
Mother London / Michael Moorcock (1988)
The heroes of this novel have emerged from mental institutions; but do they have special powers? In a
narrative that sweeps from the Blitz to modern day, we encounter mindreading, preternatural empathy,
and fascinating theories about the people who live under the streets.
American Gods / Neil Gaiman (2001)
America is now teeming with gods that have been brought over with each successive wave of immigrants
- from Odin to Thor. But can these old gods do battle with the new gods spawned by technology?
Cloud Atlas / David Mitchell (2004)
Six narrators, six interlocking stories - ranging from a future dystopia to Seventies nuclear thriller, to
19th-century medical drama - Mitchell forces the reader to make the connections across time and space;
how can interrupted stories still live on?
Darkmans / Nicola Barker (2007)
An M C Escher tapestry of history, time, language, legend - and all against the backdrop of Ashford in
Kent. Here, history is as much absurd linguistic comedy as it is nightmare.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Utopia / Thomas More (1516)
Gulliver's Travels / Jonathan Swift (1726)
The Fall of the House of Usher / Edgar Allan Poe (1840)
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There / Lewis Carroll (1871)
The Glass Bead Game / Hermann Hesse (1943)
Animal Farm / George Orwell (1945)
Childhood's End / Arthur C Clarke (1953)
The Man in the High Castle / Philip K Dick (1962)
Contact / Carl Sagan (1985)
Snow Crash / Neal Stephenson (1992)
The Scar / China Mieville (2002)
The Road / Cormac McCarthy (2006)
The Lord of the Rings / J R R Tolkien (1954-55)
The Time Machine / H G Wells (1895)
The Picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde (1890)
CHILDREN'S CLASSICS
Watership Down / Richard Adams (1972)
The full-scale novel about rabbits finding their promised land has the magic of prophecy, idyllic
Hampshire locations and the structure of the Aeneid. Adams enjoys parading his scholarship, and this is a
lively introduction to brainy books.
The Hobbit / J R R Tolkien (1937)
Here we meet the characters who will make The Lord of the Rings happen, and on a pre-Peter Jackson
scale. If anything, Gollum is even more chilling here, because we see him through the eyes of a hobbit seldom the calmest of travellers.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe / C S Lewis (1950)
Welcome to the magical land of Narnia, where the White Witch reigns over a snow-girt land peopled by
fawns, talking beavers and people eager to put their trust in four kids from Finchley. The Christian
allusions can come later, but for now this is pure narrative magic.
Charlotte's Web / E B White (1952)
The New Yorker writer cherished for his elegance of style gives us an altruistic spider with exquisite
manners, and a pig to make her proud. There are intimations of mortality, but a plot of fame and legacy
thumbs its nose at the inevitable.
The Little Prince / Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)
The Little Prince falls to Earth to meet the author, who has crashed his plane. His quizzical, wise stories of
other planets (most of which are inhabited by solitary monomaniacs) lead to the daftest of all - our own.
Pippi Longstocking / Astrid Lindgren (1945)
It's quite something to live as an orphan with just a horse and a monkey for companions. The heroine
has a chutzpah that makes her sound at her most adult when she's flouting adult conventions, especially
at tea time.
Emil and the Detectives / Erich Kastner (1929)
When Emil is robbed of his mother's hardearned savings (that were never likely to stretch far), he has
help from a scratch squad of child detectives from Berlin. However much this sounds like the best child's
game ever, the real world is seldom far away.
James and the Giant Peach / Roald Dahl (1961)
One of Dahl's earliest, best, and fully developed tales. There is no attempt to make the giant insects or
articulate clouds seem natural: this is a world of wonder, more marvellous than Wonka's even.
Winnie the Pooh / A A Milne (1926)
Characters begin days by visiting one another, and end up shifting houses, learning to fly or surviving
floods.
A Little Princess / Frances Hodgson Burnett (1905)
Sara has a privileged background but is now living as a Cinderella figure; and she plays at being a
princess. But her response shows that being a princess is less a rank than a state of mind.
The Just So Stories / Rudyard Kipling (1902)
How did the leopard get his spots? How was the alphabet made? Why are elephant's trunks so long?
Kipling is the model of the patient parent in the face of constant questions. And who cares about
evolution? This is much more fun.
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth / Jules Verne (1864)
Verne uses all the tricks that make Anthony Horowitz so successful - the action-packed chapters that end
at just the right time and the sense of deepening mystery - but also a knack for convincing us that there
really might be creatures down there.
The Wind in the Willows / Kenneth Grahame (1908)
The idyllic, stylised account of life on the river, with anxious glimpses beyond it, is a masterclass in
character-driven comedy - alongside the arriviste Toad is the petitbourgeois Mole, and Rat, the
gentleman of leisure.
The Doll People / Ann M Martin and Laura Godwin (2000)
The dolls in your dolls' house might look inanimate to you, but you clearly have no idea of what they get
up to at night. They're casing the joint, tracking lost relatives and dodging that cruel fate - PDS
(Permanent Doll State).
The Child that Books Built / Francis Spufford (2002)
Although this book isn't written for children, the more reflective might enjoy it as a guide on how to grow
into reading; and it's a wonderfully eloquent take on how growing up happens unexpectedly.
THE BEST OF THE REST
The Sword in the Stone / T H White (1938)
The Secret Garden / Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
Stig of the Dump / Clive King (1963)
Heidi / Johanna Spyri (1880)
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone / J K Rowling (1997)
How the Whale Became / Ted Hughes (1963)
The Velveteen Rabbit / Margery Williams (1922)
The Phantom Tollbooth / Norton Juster (1961)
A Boy and a Bear in a Boat Rhymes / Dave Shelton (2012)
The Little White Horse / Elizabeth Goudge (1946)
AFRICAN CLASSICS
Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe (1958)
Set in Nigeria at the turn of the 19th century, this is a heartbreaking modern Greek tragedy in which a
flawed hero finds himself at odds with the rapidly changing world. It is the classic modern African novel.
Children of Gebelawi / Naguib Mahfouz (1959)
Originally serialised in a Cairo newspaper, Children of Gebelawi is an allegory for the religious history of
the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians set in an alleyway in Cairo. It earned Mahfouz the Nobel Prize
and an assassination attempt.
Season of Migration to the North / Tayeb Salih (1966)
Beautifully rendered in lush poetic language, Salih's story of a man returning to his Sudanese village from
England is a bleak meditation on cross-cultural misunderstandings, as well as the confusions and
contradictions within the human heart.
A Bend in the River / VS Naipaul (1979)
An East African Indian, Salim leaves the east coast of Africa to set up shop in a little town on the bend of
a river in an unnamed country deep in the interior, but he is plagued by disappointment and failure as
the country falls to ruin. It is hardly a cheery book, but compelling and resonant.
My Traitor's Heart / Rian Malan (1990)
Rian Malan, from a family that included the architect of apartheid, left a divided South Africa only to
return to confront his "tribe" of white Africans and - just as much - himself. There is something unsettling
about his findings, but this is never less than totally absorbing.
The Poisonwood Bible / Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
Set in the 1960s, The Poisonwood Bible concerns a family of missionaries from the American South who
are moving to the Congo. It is at once a family drama and a study of the impact of one culture on
another.
The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency / Alexander McCall Smith (1998)
Not even the author would claim this was a "great" book, but it earns its place by being overtly cheerful
and for bringing a rare "good news" story out of an Africa that is too often characterised as a grim,
barbaric, hopeless and miserable place.
Disgrace / J M Coetzee (1999)
Winner of the Booker Prize and later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Coetzee's novel follows a
disgraced university lecturer, David Lurie, who is forced out of his post after an affair and is beginning to
come to terms with his powerlessness. Bleak and powerful, with just a hint of the possibility of
redemption.
Half of a Yellow Sun / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
Another Nigerian modern classic, set before and during the Biafran War in the late 1960s, Adichie's novel
won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2007. It describes the impact of a civil war on ordinary people and in
its moral seriousness - it acts almost as a book end to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
In the Country of Men / Hisham Matar (2006)
A beautiful description of growing up in Gaddaffi's Libya finds nine-year-old Sulaiman trying to make
sense of a life where his father is a dissident and his mother on drugs. Meanwhile, the police are closing
in...
THE BEST OF THE REST
Cry, the Beloved Country / Alan Paton (1948)
The Grass is Singing / Doris Lessing (1950)
The Bride Price / Buchi Emecheta (1976)
A Dry White Season / Andre P Brink (1979)
July's People / Nadine Gordimer (1981)
LIVES
Lives of the Caesars / Suetonius (c121AD)
Suetonius was private secretary to the emperor Hadrian and although this group biography of the lives of
the 12 Caesars might need an occasional pinch of strict historical salt, it is full of racy decadence and
colourful detail - such as Julius Caesar's semi-baldness, and his use of a comb-over to disguise it.
Experience / Martin Amis (2000)
Easily Martin Amis's best book, in which he leaves behind the struggle for effect, stops trying to say
anything serious, and in doing so creates something effective and serious about his early life, his
relations with his father, the death of his cousin, his various artistic rivalries, and, of course, those teeth.
A Moveable Feast / Ernest Hemingway (posthumously 1964)
Published three years after his death, this is part road trip, part love letter to Paris, part study of his
friendship with characters such as F Scott Fitzgerald, and wholly wonderful. It is a mystery how he
remembered a moment of it, though, since he drinks so much alcohol, all the time. Try keeping up with
him and you'll be dead drunk by page four.
The Life of Samuel Johnson / James Boswell (1791)
Less a biography and more an act of homage, this volume not only provides a close-up of the great
lexicographer, in all his terrific wit and travels, it also brings to life an entire era. Often hugely funny and Boswell omits no details.
Eminent Victorians / Lytton Strachey (1918)
Written throughout the Great War - and some think thematically influenced by this cataclysm - this
pioneering and witty group biography of major Victorians was the first to dissolve the popular image of
that era's morality and thought.
Goodbye to All That / Robert Graves (1929)
Although Graves recounts the days of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, it is his chronicle
of the First World War and his unflinching depiction of life in the trenches - the deadening banality of that
horror - that gives this book its enduring force. His comrade Siegfried Sassoon was not happy about
some of the descriptions.
The Moon's a Balloon / David Niven (1972)
These only semi-credible memoirs come from a seemingly happier, simpler time, and deal with the first
half of the actor's life as he made his way from Sandhurst to Hollywood. Packed with great stories, they
are irresistibly charming.
The Rings of Saturn / W G Sebald (1995)
Ostensibly a memoir of Sebald's walking tour around Suffolk, this extraordinary and profoundly haunting
work is also about the echoes in landscape, the long shadows of history and the inescapability of the past
- from sea-submerged villages to air force bases from which bombers flew in the war.
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys (1660-69)
Probably as close as we can get to a time machine, Pepys famously witnesses the Great Fire of London;
but more gripping throughout these hypnotically copious journals is the texture of life and love in 17thcentury London.
De Profundis / Oscar Wilde (1897)
The Latin title translates as "from the depths", and this 50,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred
Douglas was written while Wilde was in jail. It examines their time together and details Wilde's spiritual
development during his incarceration.
Alan Clark: Diaries (Vol I) (1993)
Far exceeding anything he might ever have achieved in office, the late Tory MP's diaries remain a classic
of outspoken invective, political plotting, extramarital sex, vividly unpleasant character portraits and a
relish-filled panorama of the snakepit that is Parliament.
The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas / Gertrude Stein (1933)
About as modernist as one can get, this is actually art collector Gertrude Stein's biography, written in the
voice of her lover, Alice B Toklas. Stein was close friends with Picasso - he painted her in the manner of a
stone idol - and was right at the centre of the Parisian art and literary vortex.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom / T E Lawrence (1922)
An account of Lawrence's experiences during the Arab Revolt of 1917 when he fought the Ottomans with
Emir Faisal, capturing Aqaba and winning the Battle of Tafileh. The romanticism of the imagery captured
in photographs - Lawrence in full Bedouin dress out in the desert - made him a sensation back in Britain.
Testament of Youth / Vera Brittain (1933)
In the Great War, Brittain was a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. She lost her fiance on the Western
Front, then her brother and then her two closest male friends. She vowed to write their stories, and
about her war experiences, as a form of a memorial.
My Family and Other Animals / Gerald Durrell (1956)
This account of naturalist Durrell's childhood years in Corfu is an unforgettable blend of wonderful human
comedy - the foibles of older relatives and family associates as seen through a child's eyes - plus those
same eyes looking in wonder at the abundance and variety of wildlife in the world around.
Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell (1938)
A memoir of a searingly intense time: Orwell's months in Spain during the Civil War, when he fought the
fascists alongside mountain peasants. Among many unforgettable images - the terror in Barcelona, the
moment he was shot in the neck - was the pervasiveness of the lice, and their fondness for trousers.
The Diary of a Young Girl / Anne Frank (1947)
The story is so well rehearsed and yet the details still astound; not merely the fear and the
claustrophobia, but the different shades of human behaviour and endurance. The nightmarish
circumstances of her deportation and death in Bergen-Belsen mean that no matter how familiar her story
may feel, no one should ever overlook it.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings / Maya Angelou (1969)
The poet's hugely influential biography (this was the first volume, dwelling on her early years) was on the
US bestseller lists for two years. The story of her childhood is harrowing - the racism of the deep south
and the trauma of rape. But it is also to do with the freedom that literacy and poetry brings.
Wild Swans / Jung Chang (1991)
Following the lives of three generations of the Chang family through the turmoil of 20th-century China,
this biography is a personal account that casts incandescent light on the lives and experiences of ordinary
Chinese people in extraordinary and often evil times.
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects / Giorgio Vasari (1550)
The biographical work that laid the foundations for Renaissance art history, Vasari made the reputations
of many of the "Old Masters" but he also peppers his "lives" with vivid detail - including allegations that
Andrea del Castagno murdered Domenico Veneziano, a claim that is still controversial today.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Walden / Henry David Thoreau (1854)
The Life of Charlotte Bronte / Elizabeth Gaskell (1857)
Out of Africa / Karen Blixen (1937)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
Churchill: A Life / Martin Gilbert (1969)
The Double Helix / James Watson (1968)
The Year of Magical Thinking / Joan Didion (2005)
Peter the Great: His Life and World / Robert K Massie (1981)
Maus /Art Spiegelman (1991)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius / Dave Eggers (2000)
Steve Jobs / Walter Isaacson (2011)
Persepolis / Marjane Satrapi (2000)
Anthony Blunt: His Lives / Miranda Carter (2001)
Giving up the Ghost / Hilary Mantel (2003)
The Hare with the Amber Eyes / Edmund de Waal (2010)
SPORTS AND PASTIMES
Beyond a Boundary / C L R James (1963)
"One of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies", according to V S Naipaul. C L
R James's literary book looks at race, society, politics and culture through the prism of cricket, the game
he played at top level in the Forties and Fifties.
The Fight / Norman Mailer (1975)
The Rumble in the Jungle has gone down in history as one of the epic nights of heavyweight boxing,
when Ali took on and beat George Foreman on a steamy night in (then) Zaire. Mailer records every blow
in startling prose.
Fever Pitch / Nick Hornby (1992)
Credited as being one of the things that made supporting a football team socially acceptable, Nick
Hornby's book about his relationship with Arsenal Football Club came as a surprise hit, but it touched a
nerve, and has become a classic of its kind.
The Rider / Tim Krabbe (1978)
A semi-fictionalised account of a bike race from the eye of the narrator as he struggles up the hills and
clings on during descents. The Rider is a beautiful, quiet piece of work: unusual, plausible, moving and
poignant. A must for any budding Sir Bradley.
On Bullfighting / A L Kennedy (1999)
We are all familiar with the idea of bullfighting, but A L Kennedy upends the tired old cliches with a
gimlet-eyed study of the corrida, and the men who risk their lives for the gratification of the public.
Spine-tingling.
The Damned Utd / David Peace (2006)
A shocking, biting novel that gets inside Brian Clough's head during his brief unhappy stint as manager of
Leeds United in 1974. It is not always a comfortable place to be, but the human drama is riveting.
It's Not About the Bike / Lance Armstrong (2000)
No, it isn't about the bike, and nor is it about the drugs. Instead it is about Lance Armstrong's surviving
cancer, a story that has been somewhat dimmed by subsequent events, and that he is pretty unpleasant,
but remains inspirational nonetheless.
My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes / Gary Imlach (2005)
Winner of the William Hill Sports Books Prize in 2005, this is part social history, of the Fifties and Sixties,
and part family memoir of a life lived on the fringes of professional football, in those days a very different
affair.
Addicted / Tony Adams (1998)
Remember the Arsenal offside trap of the 1990s with the Big Man putting his hand up every five minutes?
It turns out he was also doing this at the bar after the match, and this is the story of his dive into
alcoholism and subsequent recovery, showing the dark side of a glittering career. Raw and very moving.
All Played Out / Pete Davies (1991)
Davies's study of England's 1990 World Cup campaign came as something of a corrective after the mild
euphoria of watching the team reach the semi-finals. Davies points out the structural flaws in the
country's system, hidden below the surface by that one good performance and by Gazza's tears.
THE BEST OF THE REST
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner / Alan Sillitoe (1959)
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup / J L Carr (1975)
King of the World / David Remnick (1998)
Seabiscuit / Laura Hillenbrand (2001)
The Austerity Olympics / Janie Hamilton (2012)
PLAYS
The Bacchae / Euripides (405 BC)
In his last play, written in exile and performed posthumously, Euripides nailed the whole genre of
tragedy, at once celebrating its context (a Bacchic festival and spelling out the consequences of being
ruthlessly sane when a god bids otherwise.
Oedipus the King / Sophocles (after 430 BC)
The audience knows what's going to happen; but Oedipus's struggle with the terrible truths that await
him remind us that careful language, rich in irony and exposively timed, can make us scream as much as
on-stage violence can.
Doctor Faustus / Christopher Marlowe (c1592)
This play changed drama forever, by fusing the simplicity of morality plays with fashionably sumptuous
language. As a result, the message can seem murky: should you avoid selling your soul, or can it look a
little glamorous by the end?
Ghosts / Henrik Ibsen (1882)
A lot can happen in a night: revelations about syphilis; the symbolic burning of an orphanage and, above
all, blasts from the past. This last is ineluctable, the play suggests, and its messages about guilt and fate
remain unsettling.
Uncle Vanya / Anton Chekhov (1899)
Russian critics assure us that we make Chekhov sound more melancholy than he would be in the original.
It's true that Vanya's poignant glimpses of deluded failures and wince-inducing love triangles can be
played for the occasional laugh.
A Midsummer Night's Dream / William Shakespeare (c1595)
Here, some of Shakespeare's most wonderfully constructed verse is put to the service of some DavidBrent-like caricature, befuddling visions and a plot that only just manages to stay under Shakespeare's
control, let alone anybody else's.
Hamlet / William Shakespeare (c1602)
Shakespeare's longest play is one of the tightest dramatically: characters' fates are mirrored and
intertwined with an astonishing range of language: from beauty to bawdy in a beat, and the tormented
adolescent lead is among Shakespeare's most compelling creations.
Life is a Dream / Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1635)
Is theatre an illusion? Or does it make magic things actually happen? This theme dominated Calderon's
work, but in Life is a Dream matters of state are at stake. Did King Segismundo of Poland sleep through
them?
The Middle-Class Gentleman / Jean-Baptiste Moliere (1670)
However much of a chump the socialclimbing M Jourdain looks, he's not the only object of ridicule in this
revealing social satire: the intellectuals can seem ghastlier, for using their learning to taunt him and do
some climbing of their own.
Largo Desolato / Vaclav Havel (1984)
In his years of protest, Havel was able to use the language of absurdist theatre to devastating political
effect. Even the rhythms were part of the point: can an intellectual say new things, or is he trapped in a
loop of cliche and scary visitors?
The Birthday Party / Harold Pinter (1957)
Pinter's second play nearly ended his career; but the clipped, earthy dialogue, along with a thinly veiled
plea that we should respect artists and individuals (represented by a myopic pianist) guaranteed its place
in the repertoire.
Death of a Salesman / Arthur Miller (1949)
When Miller's Uncle Manny found he was in trouble, he'd change the facts. The salesman Willy Loman is
constantly in trouble. Often he deludes himself, until he notices he's just one step ahead of the junkyard.
The staging puts us into his crazed head.
The Government Inspector / Nikolai Gogol (1836)
Although Gogol wrote stories that were all too able to mimic the madness of their content, his play is
ruthlessly plotted. The characters are uniformly unsympathetic - the nebbish who passes himself off as
an inspector, no less than the sycophants he dupes.
Top Girls / Caryl Churchill (1982)
This play explores the images of women in history and literature (Joan of Arc, the Wife of Bath) while
accentuating the debates about "Top Girls" as mothers and professionals.
The Lieutenant of Inishmore / Martin McDonagh (2001)
McDonagh has refined a language that can tackle trauma with a kind of insouciance. His film In Bruges
made this technique famous and The Lieutenant of Inishmore puts terrorism and an underfed cat on an
equal footing.
THE BEST OF THE REST
Lysistrata / Aristophanes (411 BC)
The Rover / Aphra Behn (1677)
Miss Julie / August Strindberg (1888)
The Vortex / Noel Coward (1924)
Waiting for Godot / Samuel Beckett (1953)
The Bald Prima Donna / Eugene Ionesco (1950)
I Will Marry When I Want / Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1977)
Insignificance / Terry Johnson (1982)
Blasted / Sarah Kane (1995)
Enron / Lucy Prebble (2009)
AMERICAN CLASSICS
The Scarlet Letter / Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
Uniquely among male novelists of his era, Hawthorne's compelling story of the callous judgment meted
out to an unmarried mother by the puritans of Boston, Massachusetts, is a moving and thoughtful study
of society's ambivalent and contradictory treatment of women.
Moby Dick / Herman Melville (1851)
"In landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God," says wandering sailor Ishmael,
as he sets sail with vengeful Quaker Captain Ahab on the hunt for the monstrous white whale that
maimed him. Fathoms deep in allusion and nautical nomenclature.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain (1884)
Set in the geographic centre of the antebellum US, the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the
colourful tale of an abused and motherless boy's coming of age along the Mississippi River which wittily
challenged America's perception of itself as the "sivilized" land of the free.
The House of Mirth / Edith Wharton (1905)
Caught between her entitled taste for luxury and her yearning for true love, Lily Bart, the beautiful and
intelligent heroine of this acutely observed novel slowly slithers down the rungs of superficial New York
society to a tragic end.
The Call of the Wild / Jack London (1903)
When men "groping in the Arctic darkness" strike gold, a proud St Bernard-Scotch Collie called Buck is
sold into sledgehauling slavery. It's survival of the fittest in what E L Doctorow described as this most
"fervently American" club and fang adventure.
The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck (1939)
"I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags," Steinbeck said of his novel about a poor family
of "Okies" driven from their land in the Great Depression. It was the main reason he was awarded the
1962 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Independence Day / Richard Ford (1995)
The second book in Ford's trilogy about Frank Bascombe - sportswriter turned realtor. Coiner of such
quirky phrases as "happy as goats" and "solitary as Siberia" Bascombe's been described as "America's
most convincing everyman". Ford says he's "asleep at the switch".
The Colossus of Maroussi / Henry Miller (1941)
This impressionistic travelogue, whose rolling, incantatory style predicted the Beat Generation, was
inspired by the time Miller spent in Greece with Lawrence Durrell before the Second World War. He felt
"like a cockroach" but "came home to the world" at Mycenae.
The Catcher in the Rye / J D Salinger (1951)
Salinger's "sort of" autobiographical account of the misfit Holden Caulfield's flight from his "phony" prep
school is a controversial classic of adolescent angst that has inspired readers as diverse as President
George H W Bush and John Lennon's assassin Mark Chapman.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas / Hunter S Thompson (1971)
Described by Tom Wolfe as a "scorching epochal sensation", this reckless, drugfuelled "gross, physical
salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country" is a funny, furious and disorienting attack on the
American Dream by the original gonzo journalist.
Beloved / Toni Morrison (1987)
With an epigraph of "60 Million and more" dedicated to victims of the Atlantic slave trade, this
psychologically complex, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about a former slave who kills her infant daughter
rather than allow her to be recaptured.
All the Pretty Horses / Cormac McCarthy (1992)
The reclusive author best known for bringing a biblical sense of evil into his portrayal of the unforgiving
American landscape achieved mainstream success with this tale of a talented 16-year-old horse breaker,
evicted from his Texan ranch in 1940. First in the Border Trilogy.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter / Carson McCullers (1940)
The debut of a 23-year-old author, this small-town drama set in the Depression-era South tells of a
teenage girl, an African-American doctor, an alcoholic socialist, and a taciturn diner owner who all think
the local deaf-mute "gets" them. He doesn't.
Fugitive Pieces / Anne Michaels (1996)
In this haunting narrative of a Jewish boy who hides while the Nazis take his family, the Canadian poet
wrote that death first becomes believable when "You recognise the one whose loss, even contemplated,
you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child."
We Need to Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver (2003)
Even to his mother, Kevin Katchadourian has been a creature of "opaque predilections" since birth. But
she spends this novel trying to work out why her son committed a school massacre. Was her snobbery
about her fellow Americans a cause? Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)
THE BEST OF THE REST
The Great Gatsby / F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
For Whom the Bell Tolls / Ernest Hemingway (1940)
Rabbit, Run / John Updike (1960)
The Color Purple / Alice Walker (1982)
The Human Stain / Philip Roth (2000)
White Noise / Don DeLillo (1985)
The Bonfire of the Vanities / Tom Wolfe (1987)
The Shipping News / Annie Proulx (1993)
Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace (1996)
ASIAN CLASSICS
The Dream of the Red Chamber / Cao Xueqin (printed 1791)
With a cast of more than 400 characters, this episodic novel written in the vernacular rather than
classical Chinese tells of two branches of an aristocratic family with a tragic love story at its humane
heart. Chairman Mao admired its critique of feudal corruption.
A Fine Balance / Rohinton Mistry (1995)
Set during the Emergency of 1970 (a period marked by political unrest, torture and detentions), Mistry is
critical of then-prime minister Indira Gandhi, although she is never named. Four characters from very
different backgrounds are brought together by rapid social changes.
Rashomon / Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1915)
The author of more than 150 modernist short stories, but no full-length novels, Ryunosuke published
Rashomon in a university magazine when he was just 17. Just 13 pages long, it comprises seven
statements regarding the murder of a Samurai and his wife's disappearance.
The Thousand Nights and One Night / Anonymous (First published in English 1706)
Wiley Scheherazade diverts the sultan from her execution with the poetic and riddlesome adventures of
Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad and mystical creatures. Packing in crime, horror, fantasy and romance, it
influenced authors as diverse as Tolstoy, Dumas, Rushdie, Conan Doyle, Proust and Lovecraft.
Heat and Dust / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)
In this compelling novel by the only person to have won both the Booker Prize and an Oscar, a woman
travels to India to learn the truth about her step-grandmother and her life under the British Raj of the
1920s.
All About H Hatterr / G V Desani (1948)
It's the glorious mash-up of English and Indian colloquialism that makes this book, about the son of a
European merchant and a Malayan lady, such a wild, whimsical delight. Anthony Burgess admired its
"creative chaos that grumbles at the restraining banks".
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle / Haruki Murakami (1994)
This labyrinthine and hallucinogenic novel gets going when Toru Okada's cat disappears in suburban
Tokyo. He consults a pair of psychic sisters who appear to him in dreams and reality. But although
Murakami's plot meanders, it never loses its pace or its humanity.
Spring Snow / Yukio Mishima (1969-71)
Before committing ritual suicide in November 1970, Mishima posted this tetralogy of novels (named after
a dry lunar plain once believed awash with water) to his publisher. It's a saga of 20th-century Japan, in
which a law student imagines a school friend constantly reincarnated.
Midnight's Children / Salman Rushdie (1980)
Magic realism meets postcolonial India in the ambitious, colourful and clever novel which was awarded
the "Booker of Bookers" Prize. Hero Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947:
the second of India's independence and is endowed with an extraordinary talent.
The God of Small Things / Arundhati Roy (1997)
This intense and exquisitely written tale of fraternal twins unfolds against a backdrop of communism, the
caste system, and Christianity in Kerala from the Sixties to the Nineties. "Change is one thing," writes
Roy in her Booker Prize-winning debut, "Acceptance is another".
THE BEST OF THE REST
The Home and the World / Rabindranath Tagore (1916)
Diary of a Madman / Lu Xun (1918)
An Insular Possession / Timothy Mo (1986)
The Holder of the World / Bharati Mukherjee (1993)
A Suitable Boy / Vikram Seth (1993)