Read The Tin Drum

A Roman patrician and a Christian girl under Nero; Sienkiewicz's Nobel.

Oskar stops growing at three and drums through the rise of the Nazis in Danzig.

A distillery family in Shandong during the Japanese invasion; Mo Yan's Nobel novel behind Zhang Yimou's film.

Florentino waits fifty-one years, nine months and four days for Fermina; Garcia Marquez's romance.

Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish messiah, across Poland and Turkey in 900 pages numbered backwards.

A poet-doctor and Lara through the revolution and civil war; smuggled out and given the Nobel.

One ordinary day in a Siberian labour camp; the book that told the USSR about the Gulag.

Sethe, a runaway slave, and the ghost of the daughter she killed; Morrison's masterpiece.