A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.
The Compson family through four narrators, one of them Benjy; Faulkner's hardest and greatest.
Expatriates drink through Paris and Pamplona; Hemingway's lost generation.
A Brahmin's son leaves the Buddha to find his own way, and finds it at a river.
Two tramps wait by a tree for someone who does not come; the play of the century.
Roquentin in a Normandy town discovers that existence is absurd, starting with a chestnut root.
Schoolboys on an island, a conch and a pig's head on a stick; civilisation lasts a week.
A family carries their mother's coffin across Mississippi in fifty-nine monologues; "my mother is a fish".
Milkman Dead searches for gold and finds his family's past; Morrison's flying men.
Elie Wiesel at fifteen in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; a hundred pages that changed how the Holocaust is written.
Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.
Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.
Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley across two generations; Steinbeck's own favourite.
Four generations of a Lubeck merchant family in decline; Mann's Nobel novel at 26.
Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.
One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.
Santiago, a marlin and the sharks; the novella that got Hemingway the Nobel.
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.
The Joads drive from the Dust Bowl to California; Steinbeck's angriest and best.
Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse in the Italian war; the retreat from Caporetto.
Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.
A Roman patrician and a Christian girl under Nero; Sienkiewicz's Nobel.
An orphan and a Tibetan lama on the Grand Trunk Road, and the Great Game; Kipling's India.
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