Hester Prynne and the letter on her dress in Puritan Boston.
A sour orphan finds a locked garden on a Yorkshire estate and brings it back to life.
Offred's Gilead, told in the present tense as if it were already here.
Heathcliff and Cathy on the Yorkshire moors; a love story with no nice people in it.
The boy who would not grow up, Neverland and Captain Hook.
The letters of a young man in hopeless love; it started a fashion for blue coats and suicide.
A spectral dog on Dartmoor and the most famous Holmes novel of all.
Bazarov the nihilist visits the country estate of his friend's family; Turgenev's generation gap.
Two hundred and fifty myths of transformation in one poem; where the Renaissance got its gods.
Three witches, one prophecy and a Scottish couple who take it literally; the short, bloody one.
Paul's twins, born with the memories of their ancestors, and the choice Leto makes.
Dickens' favourite child, from a blacking factory to a writer's desk; Micawber and Uriah Heep.
Whitewashing the fence, the cave and Injun Joe; Twain's boyhood on the river.
Two households in Verona and five days from the ball to the tomb.
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.
The last foray in Lithuania in 1811, in thirteen books of verse; the Polish national epic.
The prince, the ghost and the delay; the most quoted play in English.
The twelve Strand stories, A Scandal in Bohemia to The Copper Beeches.
Journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in the poem that founded the Italian language
Salinger's restless coming-of-age classic (1951).
Joyce's dense, dazzling single day in Dublin (1922).
Austen's witty romance of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy (1813).
Coelho's fable of a shepherd chasing his dream (1988).
Bradbury's dystopia where books are burned (1953).
Bulgakov's satirical devil-in-Moscow masterpiece (1967).
Tolstoy's epic of Russia in the Napoleonic age (1869).
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