Josef K. is arrested for something nobody will name; the word Kafkaesque comes from here.
Gregor Samsa wakes as an insect and his family adjusts; Kafka in sixty pages.
An ageing writer, a Polish boy on the Lido and the cholera nobody mentions.
Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.
Four generations of a Lubeck merchant family in decline; Mann's Nobel novel at 26.
An orphan and her grandfather in the Swiss Alps; the book that invented Alpine tourism.
A wooden puppet who lies, the Fox and the Cat and the belly of the shark; darker than Disney.
A red-haired orphan sent by mistake to a Prince Edward Island farm; Canada's best-loved book.
A sour orphan finds a locked garden on a Yorkshire estate and brings it back to life.
Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad of Toad Hall on the riverbank.
An orphan and a Tibetan lama on the Grand Trunk Road, and the Great Game; Kipling's India.
A Warsaw merchant in love with an aristocrat; Prus's panorama of 1870s Poland.
A Roman patrician and a Christian girl under Nero; Sienkiewicz's Nobel.
The last foray in Lithuania in 1811, in thirteen books of verse; the Polish national epic.
The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6 and the rest; the short story as we know it.
A bored dandy rejects Tatyana and regrets it; Pushkin's novel in verse.
Bazarov the nihilist visits the country estate of his friend's family; Turgenev's generation gap.
Chichikov tours provincial Russia buying dead serfs on paper; Gogol's comic epic.
A spiteful clerk in a Petersburg basement argues with everyone; the first existentialist novel.
Prince Myshkin, too good for Petersburg society, and the woman two men destroy.
Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.
A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".
Julien Sorel climbs through Restoration France by seduction; Stendhal's ambition novel.
A miners' strike in northern France; Zola went down the pits to write it.
A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy bored into adultery and debt; the perfect novel, said Nabokov.
Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.
Jean Valjean, a loaf of bread and nineteen years; Hugo's Paris from the sewers to the barricades.
D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis against the Cardinal; all for one.
Down an Icelandic volcano to an underground sea of dinosaurs.
Phileas Fogg's wager and Passepartout across a world of new railways and steamships.
Infobox
