Esther Greenwood's summer in New York and the breakdown after; Plath's only novel.
Schoolboys on an island, a conch and a pig's head on a stick; civilisation lasts a week.
Sal and Dean across America on a benzedrine scroll; the Beat generation's bible.
Ice-nine, a fake religion and the end of the world in a Caribbean republic; Vonnegut at his funniest.
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time between Dresden and Tralfamadore; so it goes.
Yossarian wants out of the war but only the sane ask, and asking proves you are sane; Heller's loop.
Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.
A thirty-year-old is dragged back to school; Gombrowicz's grotesque about immaturity.
Saint-Exupery flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes, and crashing in the Libyan desert.
Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.
Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.
One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.
A 999-line poem and the mad commentary of the man who stole it; Nabokov's puzzle novel.
Humbert Humbert's road trip with a 12-year-old and the most beautiful prose about the worst thing.
A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.
A bookish narrator and a Cretan who dances; Kazantzakis on how to live.
Orwell as a dishwasher and a tramp; poverty from the inside.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
The pigs take over the farm; all animals are equal, but some more than others.
Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.
Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.
Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.
Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.
Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.
A chess champion and a man who survived the Gestapo by playing games in his head, on a liner to Buenos Aires.
Three generations of the Trotta family and the last decades of the Habsburg empire.
An idiot, or a genius, in the Austro-Hungarian army; the funniest book about a war.
A Brahmin's son leaves the Buddha to find his own way, and finds it at a river.
Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.
Infobox
