Bazarov the nihilist visits the country estate of his friend's family; Turgenev's generation gap.
Zamyatin's 1921 glass city of numbers; the book Orwell and Huxley both borrowed from.
Julien Sorel climbs through Restoration France by seduction; Stendhal's ambition novel.
A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".
Prince Myshkin, too good for Petersburg society, and the woman two men destroy.
Martians land in Surrey with heat rays; the first alien invasion.
The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.
The prince, the ghost and the delay; the most quoted play in English.
Two households in Verona and five days from the ball to the tomb.
Two hundred and fifty myths of transformation in one poem; where the Renaissance got its gods.
Whitewashing the fence, the cave and Injun Joe; Twain's boyhood on the river.
Dickens' favourite child, from a blacking factory to a writer's desk; Micawber and Uriah Heep.
A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy bored into adultery and debt; the perfect novel, said Nabokov.
Pilgrims to Becket's shrine tell stories to pass the road; the Miller's is the rude one.
London and Paris during the Terror; "it is a far, far better thing that I do".
Lilliput, Brobdingnag and the horses who are wiser than men; Swift's satire dressed as travel.
Up the Congo to find Kurtz; "the horror, the horror" and the template for Apocalypse Now.
Paul's twins, born with the memories of their ancestors, and the choice Leto makes.
The last foray in Lithuania in 1811, in thirteen books of verse; the Polish national epic.
Jean Valjean, a loaf of bread and nineteen years; Hugo's Paris from the sewers to the barricades.
A spiteful clerk in a Petersburg basement argues with everyone; the first existentialist novel.
A lawsuit that outlives everyone in it, and the fog over Chancery; Dickens' biggest novel.
Ten young Florentines tell a hundred stories while the plague rages; the first modern prose.
The four March sisters through the Civil War years; Jo the writer.
Twelve years on, the emperor Paul is trapped by his own jihad and his own prophecy.
Lovers, fairies and a weaver with a donkey's head in an Athenian wood.
The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6 and the rest; the short story as we know it.
Diaries, letters and ship's logs assemble the Count; Stoker invented the vampire we have.
A respectable doctor and his other self, in sixty pages of fog.
The scholar's bargain with Mephistopheles; Goethe took sixty years to finish both parts.
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