Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and a teddy bear at Oxford; Waugh's Catholic elegy.
Esther Greenwood's summer in New York and the breakdown after; Plath's only novel.
Saint-Exupery flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes, and crashing in the Libyan desert.
Ten strangers on an island die one by one; Christie's best-selling book.
A nature columnist sent by mistake to cover an African war; Waugh's Fleet Street satire.
A wooden puppet who lies, the Fox and the Cat and the belly of the shark; darker than Disney.
Janie through three marriages in black Florida towns; Hurston's rediscovered classic.
An Englishwoman accuses an Indian doctor after the Marabar Caves; Forster on the Raj.
The Eloi, the Morlocks and the beach at the end of the world; Wells invented time travel.
Scheherazade keeps herself alive with Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, a story a night.
Aeneas from burning Troy to the founding of Rome; Virgil's answer to Homer.
A governess, a brooding master and a wife in the attic; "Reader, I married him."
Huck and Jim down the Mississippi on a raft; "all modern American literature comes from" it, said Hemingway.
Down an Icelandic volcano to an underground sea of dinosaurs.
Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.
Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, until it is not; cultivate your garden.
Hester Prynne and the letter on her dress in Puritan Boston.
An orphan and a Tibetan lama on the Grand Trunk Road, and the Great Game; Kipling's India.
Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.
Pip, Magwitch on the marshes and Miss Havisham's rotting cake.
A provincial town in 1830, Dorothea and Lydgate marrying wrong; the novel novelists call the best.
A sour orphan finds a locked garden on a Yorkshire estate and brings it back to life.
Fifty days of the Trojan War, the rage of Achilles and the death of Hector; the first book of the West.
Chichikov tours provincial Russia buying dead serfs on paper; Gogol's comic epic.
A dairymaid ruined by two men and hanged for it; Hardy's angriest book.
Offred's Gilead, told in the present tense as if it were already here.
Alex and his droogs in Nadsat slang, and the Ludovico cure; Burgess's 1962 novel, not the film.
Heathcliff and Cathy on the Yorkshire moors; a love story with no nice people in it.
Mowgli, Bagheera, Baloo and Shere Khan; the law of the jungle.
Please, sir, I want some more; Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes.
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