Literary Fiction Books Bucket List

Celie's letters to God and to her sister in 1930s Georgia; Alice Walker's Pulitzer.

Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.

The madeleine and the first volume of In Search of Lost Time; start here.

An Englishwoman accuses an Indian doctor after the Marabar Caves; Forster on the Raj.

A nameless Black narrator from a Southern college to Harlem, in a basement lit by 1,369 bulbs.

A tiny boy with a wrecked voice who believes he is God's instrument; a foul ball kills his best friend's mother.

A provincial town in 1830, Dorothea and Lydgate marrying wrong; the novel novelists call the best.

Bazarov the nihilist visits the country estate of his friend's family; Turgenev's generation gap.

A miners' strike in northern France; Zola went down the pits to write it.

Prince Myshkin, too good for Petersburg society, and the woman two men destroy.

A Warsaw merchant in love with an aristocrat; Prus's panorama of 1870s Poland.

A doctor's wife in provincial Normandy bored into adultery and debt; the perfect novel, said Nabokov.

A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".

Three brothers, a murdered father and the Grand Inquisitor; Dostoevsky's last novel.

Julien Sorel climbs through Restoration France by seduction; Stendhal's ambition novel.

A dairymaid ruined by two men and hanged for it; Hardy's angriest book.

Read Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa's great novel of power, corruption and Lima

Austen's witty romance of Elizabeth and Mr Darcy (1813).

Joyce's dense, dazzling single day in Dublin (1922).

Melville's obsessive hunt for the white whale (1851).

Salinger's restless coming-of-age classic (1951).