Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, a giant squid and Atlantis.
Martians land in Surrey with heat rays; the first alien invasion.
The Eloi, the Morlocks and the beach at the end of the world; Wells invented time travel.
A sailor who jumped ship and spends his life making up for it; Conrad's honour story.
Up the Congo to find Kurtz; "the horror, the horror" and the template for Apocalypse Now.
A Californian dog stolen to pull sleds in the Klondike remembers being a wolf.
The four March sisters through the Civil War years; Jo the writer.
Whitman's "Song of Myself" and the free verse he kept expanding for forty years.
Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.
Hester Prynne and the letter on her dress in Puritan Boston.
Whitewashing the fence, the cave and Injun Joe; Twain's boyhood on the river.
Huck and Jim down the Mississippi on a raft; "all modern American literature comes from" it, said Hemingway.
A respectable doctor and his other self, in sixty pages of fog.
Diaries, letters and ship's logs assemble the Count; Stoker invented the vampire we have.
A portrait ages while its subject sins; Wilde's only novel.
A dairymaid ruined by two men and hanged for it; Hardy's angriest book.
Becky Sharp climbs through Regency society without a heart; a novel without a hero.
A provincial town in 1830, Dorothea and Lydgate marrying wrong; the novel novelists call the best.
A lawsuit that outlives everyone in it, and the fog over Chancery; Dickens' biggest novel.
Please, sir, I want some more; Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes.
London and Paris during the Terror; "it is a far, far better thing that I do".
Dickens' favourite child, from a blacking factory to a writer's desk; Micawber and Uriah Heep.
Pip, Magwitch on the marshes and Miss Havisham's rotting cake.
Heathcliff and Cathy on the Yorkshire moors; a love story with no nice people in it.
A governess, a brooding master and a wife in the attic; "Reader, I married him."
Two aristocrats play seduction as a game by letter, in the last decade before the guillotine.
The letters of a young man in hopeless love; it started a fashion for blue coats and suicide.
The scholar's bargain with Mephistopheles; Goethe took sixty years to finish both parts.
Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, until it is not; cultivate your garden.
Lilliput, Brobdingnag and the horses who are wiser than men; Swift's satire dressed as travel.
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