Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.
Celie's letters to God and to her sister in 1930s Georgia; Alice Walker's Pulitzer.
The Joads drive from the Dust Bowl to California; Steinbeck's angriest and best.
Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.
Poirot, a snowbound train and twelve suspects; the solution everyone knows and still enjoys.
A thirty-year-old is dragged back to school; Gombrowicz's grotesque about immaturity.
Sal and Dean across America on a benzedrine scroll; the Beat generation's bible.
Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.
Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.
Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.
Ice-nine, a fake religion and the end of the world in a Caribbean republic; Vonnegut at his funniest.
One June day in London, a party and a shell-shocked veteran; Woolf's stream of consciousness.
Schoolboys on an island, a conch and a pig's head on a stick; civilisation lasts a week.
A psychiatrist and his patient-wife on the Riviera; Fitzgerald's other novel.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
George and Lennie and the farm they will never have; a hundred pages every school reads.
Scarlett O Hara from Tara to the burning of Atlanta; a thousand pages and the most popular American novel.
Paul Baumer and his classmates in the trenches; the German novel of the First World War.
A red-haired orphan sent by mistake to a Prince Edward Island farm; Canada's best-loved book.
A 999-line poem and the mad commentary of the man who stole it; Nabokov's puzzle novel.
The Compson family through four narrators, one of them Benjy; Faulkner's hardest and greatest.
A Hebridean summer house before and after the war; the "Time Passes" section.
Three days with guerrillas to blow a bridge in the Spanish Civil War.
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.
Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.
Humbert Humbert's road trip with a 12-year-old and the most beautiful prose about the worst thing.
The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.
A nameless Black narrator from a Southern college to Harlem, in a basement lit by 1,369 bulbs.
Josef K. is arrested for something nobody will name; the word Kafkaesque comes from here.
One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.
Infobox
