Best Classic Literature Books

Saul Bellow's brooding novel of two cities. Albert Corde, a Chicago dean, travels to communist Bucharest to attend his mother-in-law's deathbed, and finds himself contemplating the moral decay of both his American city and the gray totalitarian one — a meditation on civilization, conscience, and ruin.

Henry James's light, charming early comedy of manners. Two worldly, Europeanized cousins descend on their staid Puritan relatives in rural New England, and the collision of Old World sophistication and New World earnestness produces one of James's sunniest and most accessible novels.

Johann David Wyss's classic tale of survival and ingenuity. Shipwrecked on a tropical island, a resourceful Swiss family builds a new life from the wilderness, taming the land and its creatures in an episodic adventure that has delighted young readers for two centuries.

A dialogue in which the traveller Raphael Hythloday describes the island of Utopia — a society with communal property, religious tolerance, and rational social organisation. Written in Latin by Thomas More in 1516, the book gave the word 'utopia' (no-place) to all subsequent thinking about ideal societies.

Chopin's first novel follows Thérèse Lafirme, a Louisiana plantation widow whose moral convictions force a divorced man to remarry his alcoholic ex-wife, with tragic consequences that challenge her certainties.

J. Sutter is a junk journalist attending a press junket in Talcott, West Virginia, where the US Postal Service is issuing a John Henry commemorative stamp. Whitehead weaves Sutter's contemporary story with the legend of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced a machine and won — and then died — and various other perspectives across American history.

Stoker's final novel pits a young Englishman against an ancient, monstrous entity lurking beneath the English countryside — part gothic horror, part folk legend, part fever dream. Lady Arabella March conceals a terrifying secret in her estate, and only Adam Salton can confront the primordial evil coiled beneath Mercy Farm.

Jerzy Kosinski's harrowing, controversial classic. A dark-haired boy, taken for a Jew or Gypsy, wanders the brutal countryside of Eastern Europe during World War II, enduring relentless cruelty at the hands of superstitious peasants — a nightmarish allegory of war, otherness, and human savagery.

Set in fourteenth-century Italy, Valperga follows the rise of the condottiere Castruccio Castracani — a real historical figure — from boyhood idealism to tyrannical power, through the eyes of Euthanasia, the remarkable Countess of Valperga, who loves him and watches him be destroyed by ambition.

R. M. Ballantyne's classic Victorian adventure. Shipwrecked on a South Pacific island, three British boys — Ralph, Jack, and Peterkin — build an idyllic life in paradise, facing sharks, pirates, and cannibals. The hugely influential book that inspired Golding's Lord of the Flies.

On the rugged Scottish coast near Cruden Bay, Archibald Hunter is drawn into a web of mystery involving second sight, hidden treasure connected to the Spanish Armada, and dangerous conspirators — as well as a romance with the spirited American Marjory Drake.

Pauline Réage's notorious 1954 French erotic novel. A Parisian fashion photographer known only as O submits to extreme sexual and psychological domination in the name of love — a controversial, elegantly written, and deeply unsettling exploration of desire, submission, and the erasure of the self.

A historical novel about Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York — the younger of the two Princes in the Tower — and whose attempt to claim the English throne from Henry VII ended in defeat and execution. Shelley treats Warbeck as a genuine prince, making the novel a sustained meditation on legitimacy, loyalty, and the human cost of failed causes.

Rupert Sent Leger inherits a fortune and travels to a Balkan land called the Land of the Blue Mountains, where he encounters a mysterious woman in a shroud who may be a vampire — or a princess in disguise. Gothic horror merges with Ruritanian adventure in Stoker's politically ambitious late novel.