Read The Brothers Karamazov

A spiteful clerk in a Petersburg basement argues with everyone; the first existentialist novel.

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

Dostoevsky's tense moral descent of a guilty student (1866).

A successful judge falls ill and works out, over three months of dying, that he lived the whole thing wrong.

Seven years in a Davos sanatorium arguing about Europe before 1914.

Harry Haller, half man and half wolf, and the Magic Theatre; Hesse's midlife crisis.

Meursault shoots an Arab on a beach because of the sun; Camus in a hundred pages.

Oran quarantined, Dr Rieux at work; Camus's novel of the Occupation and every epidemic since.