Best Classic Literature Books

Mexico in the 1930s: religion has been outlawed, priests are hunted, and the last priest in a southern state is a wanted man. He is also a drunkard who has fathered a child and abandoned his vows. Pursued by a mestizo informer and a dedicated police lieutenant, he continues to administer sacraments he believes himself unworthy to give. Greene's greatest theological novel.

Vietnam, 1952. Thomas Fowler, a world-weary British journalist, watches as Alden Pyle, a young idealistic American CIA operative, arrives in Saigon with theories about a Third Force. Their rivalry over a Vietnamese woman, Phuong, becomes inseparable from the political catastrophe Pyle helps to engineer. Greene's prescient masterpiece about American innocence and its costs.

Lemuel Gulliver travels to four extraordinary lands — Lilliput (tiny people), Brobdingnag (giants), Laputa (flying island of abstracted philosophers), and the country of the Houyhnhnms (rational horses served by bestial humans). Each voyage is a systematic satirical assault on something Swift found contemptible in early eighteenth-century Europe.

Albany, 1938. Francis Phelan is a bum, an alcoholic, a man who dropped his infant son on the kitchen floor and could not live with it. He was also a professional baseball player and is haunted, literally, by the people he has killed. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winner is the third of the Albany Cycle — a hallucinatory, lyrical, deeply American novel about guilt, grace, and the impossibility of going home.

Frank and April Wheeler have convinced themselves they are different from their suburban Connecticut neighbours — more intelligent, more alive, too good for the lives they are living. April proposes they move to Paris. Frank agrees. The plan unravels. Yates's debut novel is the most precise and merciless portrait of postwar American suburban conformity ever written.

Vladimir and Estragon wait by a tree for someone named Godot who never arrives. Two acts, almost no action, and one of the most performed and debated plays in the history of theatre.

Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is 46, co-owner of a Toyota dealership, a member of the country club, comfortable and bored in the Pennsylvania suburb he once tried to escape. It is 1979: the gas crisis, Carter's malaise speech, Iran. His son Nelson has come back with a pregnant girlfriend. Updike's Pulitzer Prize winner — middle-class American contentment as its own form of dissatisfaction.

Augie March grows up poor and Jewish in Depression-era Chicago and refuses to be defined by it. Picaresque, exuberant, and crammed with characters from every class and corner of American life, this is Bellow's most ebullient novel—the one that announced an entirely new way of writing American English.

A sweeping portrait of English provincial society in the 1830s, centering on the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious Dr. Lydgate as they pursue their aspirations and confront their disappointments.

A spectral hound haunts the Baskerville family across the Dartmoor moors, and when the new baronet arrives to claim his inheritance, Holmes sends Watson ahead while working in secret. Conan Doyle's masterpiece fuses gothic atmosphere with rigorous detective logic into the most complete and satisfying Holmes story.

Satan visits Stalinist Moscow, accompanied by a giant black cat, a hitman, and a naked witch — exposing Soviet bureaucracy's absurdities while a novelist's story of Pontius Pilate and Jesus unfolds within the novel.

Tolstoy's vast panorama of Russian society during Napoleon's invasion, following five aristocratic families across fifteen years of war, love, loss, and transformation.

Nicolas Rubashov, a veteran of the Revolution and Old Bolshevik, is arrested by the Party he helped create and subjected to interrogation — a psychological unravelling that forces him to confront the logical endpoint of the ideology he has spent his life serving.

An unnamed Black man's journey from the South through Harlem, joining and leaving organisations that all fail to see him as an individual — a meditation on identity, race, and visibility in America.

The final weeks of the Trojan War, focusing on Achilles's wrath, his withdrawal from battle, the death of Patroclus, and his return to fight — and to mourn — with devastating consequence.

Charlie Gordon, a man with intellectual disabilities, undergoes experimental brain surgery that dramatically increases his intelligence — and must grapple with the emotional and social consequences.

American volunteer Robert Jordan fights with Spanish guerrillas during the Civil War, assigned to blow a bridge — and falls in love with Maria in the three days before the mission.

The first book in Asimov's groundbreaking Foundation series, in which mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the fall of a galactic empire and sets in motion a thousand-year plan to preserve civilisation.

Emma Bovary, a romantic idealist trapped in a provincial marriage, pursues passion and luxury through two affairs — until her delusions destroy her.

A successful judge who has lived a conventional, comfortable life falls ill and, in the process of dying, confronts the question of whether his life has been good — and discovers that it has not.

A prose-poetry masterpiece in which the prophet Almustafa offers wisdom on love, marriage, children, work, freedom, death, and the nature of good and evil before departing on a ship — one of the bestselling books of the twentieth century.

The Ramsay family's two visits to their summer house in the Hebrides, separated by ten years and the First World War — and Lily Briscoe's attempt to paint what cannot be painted.

Le Guin's first Earthsea novel follows Ged, a boy of extraordinary power who attends a school for wizards on the island of Roke and, in his pride, releases a shadow upon the world that only he can face.

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece about a former slave haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — and the legacy of slavery on the body, memory, and soul.