A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.
The decline of an aristocratic Qing family through a boy and his cousins; the greatest Chinese novel.
Patroclus and Achilles from boyhood to Troy; Miller's Orange Prize.
A Tokyo dilettante and a geisha at a hot-spring town; Kawabata's Nobel novel.
Florentino waits fifty-one years, nine months and four days for Fermina; Garcia Marquez's romance.
Toru, Naoko and Midori in 1960s Tokyo; the Murakami without magic that made him famous.
The shining prince and the women of the Heian court; the first novel, written by a woman around 1010.
A French girl and a Chinese man in colonial Saigon; Duras at 70 remembering.
Goldman's "good parts version" of a book that never existed; Westley, Buttercup and Inigo.
Two moons over Tokyo in 1984 and a cult; three volumes.
Connell and Marianne from Sligo to Trinity College; Sally Rooney.
Tomas, Tereza and Sabina in Prague 1968; Kundera's novel of philosophy and sex.
A Nigerian woman in America and the man she left in Lagos; Adichie on hair, race and home.
A lie by a 13-year-old in 1935 and Dunkirk; McEwan's best.
Two teenagers with cancer fall in love and fly to Amsterdam to meet an author.
Four families and a mother's search for a husband for Lata in 1950s India; 1,349 pages.
The second Mrs de Winter at Manderley in the shadow of the first; "last night I dreamt".
An American ambulance driver and an English nurse in the Italian war; the retreat from Caporetto.
Scarlett O Hara from Tara to the burning of Atlanta; a thousand pages and the most popular American novel.
A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.
Heathcliff and Cathy on the Yorkshire moors; a love story with no nice people in it.
Two households in Verona and five days from the ball to the tomb.
A governess, a brooding master and a wife in the attic; "Reader, I married him."
Quasimodo, Esmeralda and the cathedral Hugo wrote the book to save.
The letters of a young man in hopeless love; it started a fashion for blue coats and suicide.
A bored dandy rejects Tatyana and regrets it; Pushkin's novel in verse.
A married woman, a cavalry officer and a train; "all happy families are alike".
Two aristocrats play seduction as a game by letter, in the last decade before the guillotine.
A relationship in twenty minutes of touch mini-games; Mountains' small masterpiece.
A mansion across centuries and a maid who forgets; the visual novel critics rank first.
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