A nature columnist sent by mistake to cover an African war; Waugh's Fleet Street satire.
Janie through three marriages in black Florida towns; Hurston's rediscovered classic.
A sailor who jumped ship and spends his life making up for it; Conrad's honour story.
Please, sir, I want some more; Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes.
A lawsuit that outlives everyone in it, and the fog over Chancery; Dickens' biggest novel.
Jean Valjean, a loaf of bread and nineteen years; Hugo's Paris from the sewers to the barricades.
Martians land in Surrey with heat rays; the first alien invasion.
Prince Myshkin, too good for Petersburg society, and the woman two men destroy.
Ten young Florentines tell a hundred stories while the plague rages; the first modern prose.
A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".
The four March sisters through the Civil War years; Jo the writer.
A spiteful clerk in a Petersburg basement argues with everyone; the first existentialist novel.
Twenty-eight years on an island with a goat, a parrot and Friday; the first English novel.
Julien Sorel climbs through Restoration France by seduction; Stendhal's ambition novel.
Zamyatin's 1921 glass city of numbers; the book Orwell and Huxley both borrowed from.
Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver and the map with an X; every pirate cliche starts here.
Mowgli, Bagheera, Baloo and Shere Khan; the law of the jungle.
Phileas Fogg's wager and Passepartout across a world of new railways and steamships.
Milton's Satan, the most charismatic villain in English verse, and the Fall told in twelve books.
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.
A dairymaid ruined by two men and hanged for it; Hardy's angriest book.
Chichikov tours provincial Russia buying dead serfs on paper; Gogol's comic epic.
Dante through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise with Virgil and Beatrice; read the Inferno at least.
The Lady with the Dog, Ward No. 6 and the rest; the short story as we know it.
Fifty days of the Trojan War, the rage of Achilles and the death of Hector; the first book of the West.
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.
Watson meets Holmes at Baker Street and a body with RACHE on the wall; the first case, 1887.
The scholar's bargain with Mephistopheles; Goethe took sixty years to finish both parts.
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