A former basketball star walks out on his family; the first of four Rabbit Angstrom novels.
A nameless Black narrator from a Southern college to Harlem, in a basement lit by 1,369 bulbs.
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.
Poirot, a snowbound train and twelve suspects; the solution everyone knows and still enjoys.
A psychiatrist and his patient-wife on the Riviera; Fitzgerald's other novel.
The Compson family through four narrators, one of them Benjy; Faulkner's hardest and greatest.
A red-haired orphan sent by mistake to a Prince Edward Island farm; Canada's best-loved book.
Gregor Samsa wakes as an insect and his family adjusts; Kafka in sixty pages.
Ignatius J. Reilly, hot-dog vendor and medievalist, against New Orleans; published eleven years after the author's suicide.
Orwell as a dishwasher and a tramp; poverty from the inside.
Four generations of a Lubeck merchant family in decline; Mann's Nobel novel at 26.
Franz Biberkopf out of prison in 1928 Berlin; Doblin's montage novel of the city.
Yossarian wants out of the war but only the sane ask, and asking proves you are sane; Heller's loop.
An orphan and her grandfather in the Swiss Alps; the book that invented Alpine tourism.
Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.
Three days with guerrillas to blow a bridge in the Spanish Civil War.
George and Lennie and the farm they will never have; a hundred pages every school reads.
One June day in London, a party and a shell-shocked veteran; Woolf's stream of consciousness.
Celie's letters to God and to her sister in 1930s Georgia; Alice Walker's Pulitzer.
A family carries their mother's coffin across Mississippi in fifty-nine monologues; "my mother is a fish".
Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and a teddy bear at Oxford; Waugh's Catholic elegy.
Josef K. is arrested for something nobody will name; the word Kafkaesque comes from here.
Ten strangers on an island die one by one; Christie's best-selling book.
A miner's son in Nottinghamshire, his mother and the women he cannot love; Lawrence's autobiography.
The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.
Esther Greenwood's summer in New York and the breakdown after; Plath's only novel.
A bookish narrator and a Cretan who dances; Kazantzakis on how to live.
The pigs take over the farm; all animals are equal, but some more than others.
The Joads drive from the Dust Bowl to California; Steinbeck's angriest and best.
Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.
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