Best Classic Literature Books

Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's London boarding school as a wealthy, imaginative girl; when her father dies penniless, she is reduced to a servant's life but maintains her dignity through storytelling and the power of her own inner world.

John Steinbeck's warm, comic sequel to Cannery Row. The bums, dreamers, and good-hearted misfits of Monterey return after the war, and the whole community schemes to find love for Doc, the lonely marine biologist at the heart of their ramshackle world.

William March's chilling 1954 classic of psychological horror. Christine Penmark slowly realizes that her perfect, charming eight-year-old daughter Rhoda may be a remorseless killer — and that the evil may be inherited. A landmark exploration of the 'born bad' child that shaped a genre.

Olive Chancellor, a Boston reformer and feminist, discovers the young Verena Tarrant, whose natural gift for public speaking makes her ideal for the women's suffrage cause. Olive's relationship with Verena is complicated by the arrival of her Southern cousin Basil Ransom, who wants to marry Verena and remove her from public life.

Muriel Spark's sharp, elegant short novel of postwar London. At the May of Teck Club, a hostel for young women of slender means, the residents flirt, scheme, and share a single Schiaparelli gown in the summer of 1945 — until a sudden catastrophe exposes the moral fault lines beneath their genteel poverty.

A retelling of the medieval legend of Gregorius — a man born of incest who unknowingly marries his own mother and atones by living on a rocky island for seventeen years before being elected Pope — Mann's most playful late novel.

Gregory Reeves grows up among Latinos in East Los Angeles, serves in Vietnam, becomes a lawyer in San Francisco, and tries to outrun the poverty and violence of his childhood. Allende's first novel set in North America — a bildungsroman structured around the myth of self-invention and a portrait of the Latino community in California.

When the eminent Egyptologist Abel Trelawny falls into a mysterious coma, his daughter Margaret and young barrister Malcolm Ross find themselves drawn into the terrifying legacy of an ancient Egyptian queen — and an experiment in resurrection that may unleash something the modern world is wholly unprepared for.

An Irish woman in Mexico encounters a political and religious movement attempting to revive the ancient Aztec religion and displace Christianity — Lawrence's most politically troubling and visually extraordinary novel.

Anthony Hope's classic swashbuckling adventure. Holidaying in the fictional kingdom of Ruritania, the English gentleman Rudolf Rassendyll is recruited to impersonate the king — his distant look-alike — when the monarch is drugged and abducted, plunging him into court intrigue, swordplay, and forbidden love.

Werther, a young man of sensitivity and artistic feeling, falls in love with Charlotte, who is engaged and then married to another. His inability to either act on his love or let it go leads to his suicide. Written in epistolary form by the twenty-four-year-old Goethe, the novel triggered a wave of imitative suicides across Europe.

William Golding's intense allegorical novel of faith and obsession. Dean Jocelin is consumed by a vision: to raise a vast spire atop his medieval cathedral, though the foundations cannot bear it. As the tower rises, so do the costs — to the building, to the men, and to Jocelin's own soul.

Amory Blaine moves through Princeton and the First World War and a series of love affairs toward a nebulous self-awareness. Fitzgerald's debut novel made him famous at twenty-three and introduced the Jazz Age to American literature.

At a retired actor's cocktail party a mild old clergyman drops dead, his glass holding no trace of poison and his killing apparently without motive. When a second guest dies the same way, Poirot joins the host's amateur sleuthing to explain a murder with no discernible reason.

Ragle Gumm wins a newspaper contest called Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? every single day. He lives in a pleasant 1950s suburb. He begins to notice that things in his world are slightly wrong — objects dissolve, structures fail to match their descriptions, reality seems to have seams. His comfortable suburban life may be an elaborate construction.

Hawthorne's first major collection includes 'The Minister's Black Veil,' 'Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,' 'The Gray Champion,' and 'Wakefield' — stories of Puritan guilt, scientific hubris, moral allegory, and the stranger who removes himself from human society.

Melville's first novel, based on his actual time among the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands after jumping ship, is part adventure narrative, part ethnography, and part critique of Western civilization's assumptions about 'savagery.'

Wole Soyinka's ambitious, mythic play, written for Nigeria's 1960 independence. Blending Yoruba cosmology, satire, and modernist drama, it summons the dead to a gathering of the living, refusing easy celebration to confront a new nation with the failures and corruption of its past and future.

Chicago, 1942. Joseph, waiting to be drafted, keeps a journal for seven months. He has left his job; he cannot do anything else; he hangs in suspension. Bellow's first novel—written under the influence of Dostoevsky and Kafka—is the purest statement of the anxious intellectual that would define his career.

The boys of Plumfield are now young adults, facing real-world choices about career, marriage, and moral character, while Jo March has become a famous author and must cope with the peculiar burdens of literary celebrity.

Jude Fawley, a Dorset stonemason, dreams of university and an intellectual life. His marriage, his passion for his unconventional cousin Sue Bridehead, and society's refusal to accommodate either his ambitions or his love, grind him down. Hardy's final and darkest novel caused a scandal on publication.

A kind-hearted American boy named Cedric Errol discovers he is the heir to an English earldom, and his natural goodness gradually transforms his crusty grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt.

Written in 1819 but suppressed by Shelley's father and unpublished until 1959, Mathilda is a harrowing gothic novella about a young woman destroyed by her father's incestuous obsession and her subsequent withdrawal into grief. Autobiographical in its emotional truth, it is among the most painfully honest works Shelley ever wrote.

H. Rider Haggard's hugely influential Victorian adventure. Following an ancient relic into the African interior, Holly and Leo Vincey discover a lost kingdom ruled by Ayesha — 'She-who-must-be-obeyed' — a beautiful, immortal queen who has waited two thousand years for the return of her murdered love.