Ice-nine, a fake religion and the end of the world in a Caribbean republic; Vonnegut at his funniest.
An idiot, or a genius, in the Austro-Hungarian army; the funniest book about a war.
Bruno Schulz's Drohobycz turned into myth; the stories a Gestapo officer's bullet ended.
Sal and Dean across America on a benzedrine scroll; the Beat generation's bible.
Zweig's memoir of Vienna before 1914 and Europe after, finished the day before his suicide.
Orwell fights in the Spanish Civil War, is shot through the throat and sees the revolution betrayed.
Scarlett O Hara from Tara to the burning of Atlanta; a thousand pages and the most popular American novel.
Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley across two generations; Steinbeck's own favourite.
Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.
Paul Baumer and his classmates in the trenches; the German novel of the First World War.
A thirty-year-old is dragged back to school; Gombrowicz's grotesque about immaturity.
An ageing writer, a Polish boy on the Lido and the cholera nobody mentions.
Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.
Two sisters, a merchant family and a clerk in Edwardian England; "only connect".
K. tries to reach the authorities in a snowbound village and never does; unfinished, mid-sentence.
Bardamu through the war, colonial Africa, Detroit and the Paris suburbs; Celine's furious slang.
Philip Marlowe's first case in a corrupt Los Angeles; Chandler's similes.
An Englishwoman accuses an Indian doctor after the Marabar Caves; Forster on the Raj.
One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.
Humbert Humbert's road trip with a 12-year-old and the most beautiful prose about the worst thing.
Saint-Exupery flying the mail over the Sahara and the Andes, and crashing in the Libyan desert.
Sam Spade and the black bird; the hard-boiled detective novel in its first form.
Anne Frank in the Amsterdam annex from 1942 to 1944.
A 999-line poem and the mad commentary of the man who stole it; Nabokov's puzzle novel.
A chess champion and a man who survived the Gestapo by playing games in his head, on a liner to Buenos Aires.
Five hundred pounds a year and a room with a lock; Woolf's essay on women and writing.
Santiago, a marlin and the sharks; the novella that got Hemingway the Nobel.
A Hebridean summer house before and after the war; the "Time Passes" section.
Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.
Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.
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