Hairy-toed hobbit Frodo leaves home to defend the world from dark forces by destroying a cursed ring, in Tolkien's epic trilogy. WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
This child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama was the only novel Lee published in her lifetime – until an early draft of it was released as a "new" book in 2015.
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears, in this Bengali tale of clashing cultures from the Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist.
Extra-terrestrial travel meets very English humour, as Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic!
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, c.1988CREDIT: REX
96 One Thousand and One Nights (anonymous)
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution, in a tangled collection of Middle Eastern folk stories first translated into English in 1706.
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he! Goethe was inspired by his own obsessive romance with a married woman to write this epistolary novel, which made him famous overnight.
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth in this Booker Prize winner, which uses magical realism to question the legacy of Indian partition.
The pseudonymous le Carré drew on his own work in the secret service to create fictional spymaster George Smiley. In his finest adventure, a nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”, in a semi-autobiographical picaresque. Kerouac typed out the first draft in three near-sleepless weeks, on a single 120-foot scroll of paper.
The 120-foot scroll Kerouac used for his first complete draft of On the RoadCREDIT: AP
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism, following three characters: retired pasta-maker Goriot, mysterious felon Vautrin and ambitious student Rastingnac, an anti-hero whose name became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastery. Eco, previously an obscure semantics professor, was baffled when his book became a bestseller.
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km, in a shaggy dog story that won Carey the first of his two Man Booker Prizes (he scooped the award again in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang).
Rhys's post-colonial prequel to Jane Eyre gives moving, human voice to the mad woman in attic (Mr Rochester's first wife).
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
The ludic logic of "Carroll" (the pen-name of mathematician Charles Dodgeson) makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast, as young Alice slips down the rabbit-hole into a bonkers world of talking animals.
US Air Force pilot Yossarian drives himself crazy trying get out of active service in the Second World War. But trying to get out of a war is clear-cut proof of sanity, surely? So he's stuck. The title of Heller's satirical epic is still shorthand for inescapable lose-lose loopholes.
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”? We never find out, but this posthumously published nightmare made "Kafkaesque" the go-to label for any instance of hellish bureaucracy.
The first part of a trilogy inspired by by Lee's Gloucester childhood, here the protagonist's first romantic encounter with the titular Rosie (that “first long secret drink of golden fire”) is under a hay wagon.
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage German soldier. It became an Oscar-winning film in 1930, and was later banned – and burned – in Hitler's Germany.
A scribulous riff on travellers’ tall tales. The Brobdingnag giants and Lilliput midgets Gulliver meets may seem far-fetched, but Swift's satirical targets were closer to home (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
Madhouse memories of the Second World War, narrated by a drum-playing adult in a child's body with a super-human shriek. A key text of European magical realism.
A scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him. The narrator may be a loathsome paedophile, but his gift for language is irresistible. First published in Paris, Nabokov's darkly comic novel caused a scandal; the Home Office ordered customs guards to seize any copy entering the UK.
After nuclear war has rendered most of the United States sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding in a close-to-the-bone sci-fi tale. As Atwood has pointed out, every act of cruelty inflicted on women in this book has already happened somewhere in the world.
Elisabeth Moss in the 2017 TV adaptation of The Handmaid's TaleCREDIT: AP
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery. In Virginia controversy over its graphic content led to the so-called "Beloved bill" – a draft law giving parents the right to ban books from schools – though the bill was vetoed by the state's governor in 2016.
Against the backdrop of the 1968 Prague Spring, A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, Kundera muses, surely it can’t matter?
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue, in what one critic called a savage attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class".
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl. The roguish anti-hero was modelled on the poet Philip Larkin.
McEwan put the “c” word in the classic English country house novel, following a lovelorn student from a stately home to prison to the Second World War.
Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in the 2007 film adaptation of Atonement
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences, as a scientist assembles a new body bits of corpses – and brings it to life. Shelley was still a teenager when she wrote it, after Lord Byron challenged her to come up with a ghost story.
Hailed by TS Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”, it retells the hunt for a missing jewel through a series of letters.
Modernist masterpiece, reworking Homer with humour. Following a bored student and a middle-aged advertising salesman as they wander across Dublin, it contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India (inspired by English Forster's own time on the subcontinent, working as a secretary to a Maharajah).
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah! Centuries later, Tristram's failed attempt to tell his life story (he keeps getting distracted mid-sentence) still has readers cackling with laughter.
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles. A radio adaptation by Orson Welles was so successful that (so the story goes) American listeners really thought aliens were invading.
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off. Published under a pseudonym, it was Emily Brontë's only novel; she died a year later.
Spiky Elizabeth can't stand aloof Mr Darcy, and he's not too keen on her either. Sure enough, they're soon in love – but how will they deal with her ghastly family?
Picaresque tale about elderly gent who decides to become a knight in shining armour (he's read too many romantic novels). It's given us the word "quixotic" (for any over-idealistic boondoggle).
While holding a party, our heroine hears about a stranger's suicide – and finds it oddly inspirational – in a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness modernism.
Mrs Dalloway author Virginia Woolf, c.1920CREDIT: GETTY
“The conquest of the earth,” writes Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.” Steamboat captain Marlowe discovers that himself, when he travels up the Congo for a rendezvous with a deranged ivory trader. Francis Ford Coppola shifted the plot to Sixties Vietnam for his film Apocalypse Now.
Tolstoy’s idea for this tale of a doomed adulteress's affair with a rich count grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”. William Faulkner thought it was the finest novel ever written – and so did the none-too-modest Tolstoy.
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale that ate his leg, in a 900-page epic narrated by a sailor who calls himself Ishmael. The insights into human nature more than make up for the lengthy descriptions of harpooning.
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf, praising this richly detailed portrait of overlapping lives in a fictional Midlands town.
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