A provincial town in 1830, Dorothea and Lydgate marrying wrong; the novel novelists call the best.
Two aristocrats play seduction as a game by letter, in the last decade before the guillotine.
Pip, Magwitch on the marshes and Miss Havisham's rotting cake.
Two years in a cabin by a pond; Thoreau on living deliberately.
An orphan and a Tibetan lama on the Grand Trunk Road, and the Great Game; Kipling's India.
Becky Sharp climbs through Regency society without a heart; a novel without a hero.
Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, until it is not; cultivate your garden.
Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.
A king divides his kingdom among his daughters and goes mad on the heath.
Down an Icelandic volcano to an underground sea of dinosaurs.
Iago whispers and the Moor of Venice believes him; the tragedy of a handkerchief.
Huck and Jim down the Mississippi on a raft; "all modern American literature comes from" it, said Hemingway.
A governess, a brooding master and a wife in the attic; "Reader, I married him."
Down the rabbit hole with the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts; nonsense with logic underneath.
A miners' strike in northern France; Zola went down the pits to write it.
A Roman patrician and a Christian girl under Nero; Sienkiewicz's Nobel.
Captain Nemo and the Nautilus, a giant squid and Atlantis.
Scheherazade keeps herself alive with Sinbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, a story a night.
The Eloi, the Morlocks and the beach at the end of the world; Wells invented time travel.
Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad of Toad Hall on the riverbank.
A bored dandy rejects Tatyana and regrets it; Pushkin's novel in verse.
A stolen treasure, a one-legged man and Watson falling in love, in the second novel.
D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis against the Cardinal; all for one.
Whitman's "Song of Myself" and the free verse he kept expanding for forty years.
A Californian dog stolen to pull sleds in the Klondike remembers being a wolf.
Aeneas from burning Troy to the founding of Rome; Virgil's answer to Homer.
Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.
A Warsaw merchant in love with an aristocrat; Prus's panorama of 1870s Poland.
Alex and his droogs in Nadsat slang, and the Ludovico cure; Burgess's 1962 novel, not the film.
A portrait ages while its subject sins; Wilde's only novel.
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