Franz Biberkopf out of prison in 1928 Berlin; Doblin's montage novel of the city.
Paul Baumer and his classmates in the trenches; the German novel of the First World War.
Richard Hannay hunted across Scotland by spies in 1914; the chase thriller begins.
Ten strangers on an island die one by one; Christie's best-selling book.
Poirot, a snowbound train and twelve suspects; the solution everyone knows and still enjoys.
Philip Marlowe's first case in a corrupt Los Angeles; Chandler's similes.
Sam Spade and the black bird; the hard-boiled detective novel in its first form.
The second Mrs de Winter at Manderley in the shadow of the first; "last night I dreamt".
Janie through three marriages in black Florida towns; Hurston's rediscovered classic.
Scarlett O Hara from Tara to the burning of Atlanta; a thousand pages and the most popular American novel.
A family carries their mother's coffin across Mississippi in fifty-nine monologues; "my mother is a fish".
The Compson family through four narrators, one of them Benjy; Faulkner's hardest and greatest.
A psychiatrist and his patient-wife on the Riviera; Fitzgerald's other novel.
Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley across two generations; Steinbeck's own favourite.
George and Lennie and the farm they will never have; a hundred pages every school reads.
The Joads drive from the Dust Bowl to California; Steinbeck's angriest and best.
Santiago, a marlin and the sharks; the novella that got Hemingway the Nobel.
Three days with guerrillas to blow a bridge in the Spanish Civil War.
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse in the Italian war; the retreat from Caporetto.
Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.
A nature columnist sent by mistake to cover an African war; Waugh's Fleet Street satire.
Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and a teddy bear at Oxford; Waugh's Catholic elegy.
Two sisters, a merchant family and a clerk in Edwardian England; "only connect".
An Englishwoman accuses an Indian doctor after the Marabar Caves; Forster on the Raj.
A miner's son in Nottinghamshire, his mother and the women he cannot love; Lawrence's autobiography.
Five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock; Woolf's essay on women and writing.
A Hebridean summer house before and after the war; the "Time Passes" section.
One June day in London, a party and a shell-shocked veteran; Woolf's stream of consciousness.
The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.
K. tries to reach the authorities in a snowbound village and never does; unfinished, mid-sentence.
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