Best Classic Literature Books

Rousseau asks how humans can be both free and subject to law. His answer — the social contract, by which individuals submit to the general will — became the theoretical foundation of modern democracy, influenced the French Revolution, and is still the starting point for thinking about legitimate political authority.

A three-week love affair between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a young Black woman, in San Francisco's North Beach — narrated in the long, breath-driven sentences Kerouac developed from jazz improvisation. Written in three nights, his most formally concentrated novel.

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

Smith's investigation into the causes of national prosperity — the division of labour, free markets, the price system, and the folly of mercantilism. Published in 1776, it became the foundational text of modern economics and the primary intellectual source for arguments in favour of market capitalism.

Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.

Razumov, a Russian student in St Petersburg, witnesses a fellow student's assassination of a government minister — and is forced to choose between betraying his colleague to the police or destroying his own future. Conrad's most explicitly political novel is a study of betrayal, guilt, and the way political ideology consumes individual moral life.

Georges Perec's haunting, formally daring memoir-novel. Alternating chapters braid Perec's fragmentary memories of a childhood shadowed by the Holocaust with a chilling fictional allegory of an island society obsessed with sport — two narratives that converge on the unspeakable horror at the heart of his lost family.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's landmark debut, the first English-language novel by an East African writer. Through the hopes of young Njoroge, who longs for education, it tells of a Kenyan family and community torn apart by the Mau Mau uprising and the violence of British colonial rule.

A vicar's son finds a man dying at the foot of a cliff. The stranger's last gasped words — 'Why didn't they ask Evans?' — make no sense, but they will not leave Bobby Jones alone. With the dauntless Lady Frankie at his side, he sets out to learn who Evans is and what they should have asked.

Thomas Bernhard's part-memoir, part-fiction account of a friendship. While confined to a hospital, the narrator reflects on his bond with Paul Wittgenstein — nephew of the philosopher — a brilliant, doomed man given to madness, in a mordant, obsessive meditation on illness, friendship, genius, and Austrian society.

Country girl Polly Milton visits fashionable Boston and discovers that her plain, warm, old-fashioned values stand in refreshing contrast to the shallow vanities of city society — and later returns to prove her independence as a working woman.

The fourth Anne of Green Gables novel. Engaged to Gilbert but separated by his medical studies, Anne spends three years as principal of Summerside High School, boarding at Windy Poplars and winning over a town wary of newcomers — told largely through her letters home.

Kerouac retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur to escape fame and alcohol, fails to escape either, and has a breakdown. His most autobiographically honest novel is also his darkest — the romantic road narrative collapsed into the specific hell of alcoholism and celebrity.

On an afternoon flight from Paris to London, a moneylender is found dead in her seat, apparently killed by a poisoned dart from a blowpipe. The cabin was sealed, the passengers few — and one of them is Hercule Poirot, who slept through the perfect murder.

Descartes's account of how he came to doubt everything that could be doubted and arrived at the one certainty that could not be doubted — I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum). The founding document of modern Western philosophy, written in French rather than Latin to be readable by non-specialists.

Joyce's final novel is written in a multilingual dream-prose of puns, portmanteaux, and allusions, narrating the sleep and dream of HCE in a Dublin pub. The greatest single act of formal ambition in the novel's history.

Scout Finch, now Jean Louise and twenty-six, returns to Maycomb from New York to visit her father — and discovers that Atticus Finch holds views on race and segregation she cannot reconcile with the man she idolized.

Charles Dickens's shortest novel and his fiercest social critique. Set in the grim industrial town of Coketown, it skewers the cold utilitarian philosophy of 'facts, facts, facts' through the Gradgrind family, indicting an age that starves the imagination and crushes the human spirit.

Augusto Roa Bastos's monumental 'dictator novel,' reimagining the rule of Paraguay's Dr. José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. A dazzling, fragmentary, polyphonic meditation on absolute power, history, and language itself, it is a landmark of Latin American literature and one of the great novels of tyranny.

Jo March, now married to Professor Bhaer, runs Plumfield School for boys, where she and her husband put their progressive educational ideals into practice with a diverse cast of boys each needing something different from school.

At a remote archaeological dig in Iraq, the famous archaeologist's beautiful, fearful wife is found bludgeoned in her room — a room no stranger could have entered unseen. A nurse narrates the strange events, and Hercule Poirot happens to be passing through the desert.

The second of Updike's Rabbit novels. A decade after Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom is a settled, deadened print worker in 1969 — until his wife leaves and his house fills with a runaway teenager and a Black militant, drawing the turmoil of the American 1960s into his living room.

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov recognises, as a juror at a murder trial, the woman he seduced and abandoned years before. Overcome by guilt, he follows Katyusha Maslova through the Russian prison and exile system — a journey that becomes Tolstoy's most sustained indictment of the state, the church, and the landed class.

Set in fifteenth-century Florence during the life of Savonarola, Eliot's most researched novel follows Romola, daughter of a blind scholar, whose Greek husband Tito Melema is one of fiction's most precisely observed depictions of moral deterioration by small increments.