A miner's son in Nottinghamshire, his mother and the women he cannot love; Lawrence's autobiography.
Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.
Philip Marlowe's first case in a corrupt Los Angeles; Chandler's similes.
Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time between Dresden and Tralfamadore; so it goes.
A former basketball star walks out on his family; the first of four Rabbit Angstrom novels.
A bookish narrator and a Cretan who dances; Kazantzakis on how to live.
Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.
A chess champion and a man who survived the Gestapo by playing games in his head, on a liner to Buenos Aires.
Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley across two generations; Steinbeck's own favourite.
Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.
An idiot, or a genius, in the Austro-Hungarian army; the funniest book about a war.
A family carries their mother's coffin across Mississippi in fifty-nine monologues; "my mother is a fish".
Five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock; Woolf's essay on women and writing.
K. tries to reach the authorities in a snowbound village and never does; unfinished, mid-sentence.
Santiago, a marlin and the sharks; the novella that got Hemingway the Nobel.
Three generations of the Trotta family and the last decades of the Habsburg empire.
A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.
Sam Spade and the black bird; the hard-boiled detective novel in its first form.
Two sisters, a merchant family and a clerk in Edwardian England; "only connect".
Four generations of a Lubeck merchant family in decline; Mann's Nobel novel at 26.
The second Mrs de Winter at Manderley in the shadow of the first; "last night I dreamt".
Orwell as a dishwasher and a tramp; poverty from the inside.
Ignatius J. Reilly, hot-dog vendor and medievalist, against New Orleans; published eleven years after the author's suicide.
Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.
Yossarian wants out of the war but only the sane ask, and asking proves you are sane; Heller's loop.
Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.
The pigs take over the farm; all animals are equal, but some more than others.
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse in the Italian war; the retreat from Caporetto.
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.
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