Best Classic Literature Books

A brave Scottish general is corrupted by ambition and prophecy, murders his king, seizes the throne, and descends into a tyranny from which there is no return.

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, unadventurous hobbit, is swept away by the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves on a quest to reclaim a mountain kingdom from the dragon Smaug. The predecessor to The Lord of the Rings — shorter, lighter in tone, and the perfect entry point to Middle-earth.

Two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — live parallel lives in California's Salinas Valley over three generations, reenacting the story of Cain and Abel with tragic consequence.

The epic story of Jean Valjean — ex-convict transformed by grace into a man of extraordinary goodness — pursued across decades by the implacable Inspector Javert.

Through letters — to God and to her sister — Celie chronicles her life of abuse in rural Georgia, her transformation through Shug Avery's love, and her gradual discovery of her own power.

Edmond Dantès, wrongfully imprisoned for years, escapes with a vast fortune and reinvents himself as the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo to exact perfect revenge on those who betrayed him.

The animals of Manor Farm overthrow their human farmer, establish a democracy, and watch helplessly as the pigs gradually become indistinguishable from the humans they replaced.

Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant insect — and the story focuses less on the transformation than on his family's response to it.

Beautiful Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain — his portrait ages and corrupts in his place — while Lord Henry Wotton's philosophy of pleasure guides him toward increasingly dark excesses.

A plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and Dr. Bernard Rieux leads the medical response — in a novel that is simultaneously a chronicle of epidemic and an allegory for Nazi occupation.

American ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with English nurse Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the Italian front in World War I — a love story that the war will not leave intact.

A story of love, sacrifice, and revolution set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, moving between London and Paris on the eve of the Terror.

An imaginative, red-haired orphan is accidentally sent to Avonlea instead of the boy the Cuthbert siblings expected — and changes their lives and the whole town forever.

In a future where firemen burn books rather than extinguish fires, Guy Montag begins to question the society he enforces — and the books he has been trained to destroy.

Victor Frankenstein's obsessive creation of life — and his abandonment of the creature he brings into being — with consequences that pursue them both to the ends of the earth.

A group of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island organise themselves — and gradually descend from democratic order to murderous tribalism.

Two itinerant ranch workers in Depression-era California — the clever George and the big, gentle Lennie — share a dream of their own land that the world will not allow them to reach.

Hercule Poirot investigates the murder of a wealthy village squire in what became the most controversial and celebrated mystery novel ever written.

The tempestuous, obsessive love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw across two generations on the wild Yorkshire moors.

Hercule Poirot investigates a murder aboard a luxury Nile steamer, where every passenger has a motive and the truth is buried beneath layers of deception.

Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to assist Count Dracula with a London property purchase — and discovers that his host is a centuries-old vampire with designs on England.

The March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — come of age in New England during the Civil War in Alcott's beloved portrait of female friendship, ambition, and the choices a woman's life requires.

Milkman Dead journeys from his prosperous Michigan family into the American South in search of gold and discovers instead his family's history, his people's mythology, and the meaning of flight.

American expatriates and British socialites drink their way through Paris and Pamplona, orbiting around the love that Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley cannot consummate.