Best Classic Literature Books

In post-nuclear San Francisco, bounty hunter Rick Deckard hunts down rogue androids nearly indistinguishable from humans — the basis for the film Blade Runner.

New York lawyer Newland Archer is engaged to the perfectly suitable May Welland when the scandalous Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe — and complicates everything he thought he wanted.

In 1940s Ohio, a young Black girl named Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes, believing beauty — as defined by the white standards she has absorbed — is the one thing that could save her from her world's cruelties.

Holden Caulfield, expelled from his fourth prep school, wanders New York for three days before a breakdown — narrating his alienation with an intensity that defined adolescent literary voice.

Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty — alter egos of Kerouac and Neal Cassady — drive back and forth across America in search of sensation, connection, and the meaning of the American road.

A selection of Seneca's letters to his friend Lucilius, covering friendship, death, time, philosophy, nature, and the cultivation of a virtuous mind.

Sisters Elinor and Marianne Dashwood navigate love and social constraint in Regency England — embodying the novel's central opposition between prudent sense and passionate sensibility.

Edna Pontellier, a married woman in nineteenth-century New Orleans, awakens to her own desires — for independence, for art, for love — in a society that offers her no way to live them.

Prince Lev Myshkin returns to Russia after years of Swiss treatment for epilepsy — gentle, sincere, and incapable of the social calculus that governs everyone around him. Dostoevsky's attempt to portray a truly good man, and what happens when such a man meets the world.

A series of linked stories following the colonisation of Mars by humans fleeing an increasingly troubled Earth — a work less concerned with the science of space travel than with what humanity brings with it, and what it destroys in the process.

A spoiled orphan comes to live on the Yorkshire moors and discovers a secret walled garden that transforms her — and everyone around her.

Lucy Honeychurch travels to Florence with her cousin and chaperone, encounters a room with a view and a young man who insists on honesty, and discovers that choosing her own life is harder than she expected.

Twelve years after his jihad swept across the known universe, Paul Muad'Dib sits on the throne of an empire built on ten billion dead. His prescience is a prison, his legend a weapon turned against him, and a conspiracy is forming to finally bring him down.

Jim Burden looks back on the Bohemian immigrant girl who defined his Nebraska childhood and shaped everything he has become.

In a small Illinois town in October, a carnival arrives just after midnight — Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show — and two thirteen-year-old boys discover that its attractions offer exactly what people most desire, at a price that cannot be paid.

The friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two Black women in the Bottom — a hilltop community in Ohio — over five decades, and what Sula's freedom costs both of them.

An undercover narc in near-future California becomes addicted to the drug he's surveilling, losing his grip on his own identity in this partly autobiographical novel by Philip K. Dick.

A writer researching the life of the atomic bomb's inventor discovers ice-nine — a form of water that freezes solid at room temperature — in the hands of dangerous and careless people. Vonnegut's darkest comedy.

George Orwell's first book: a memoir of destitution — months spent penniless in Paris, working as a plongeur in restaurant kitchens, and then weeks tramping between workhouses in England — written with the observational precision that would define everything that followed.

Three families — the cultivated Schlegels, the commercial Wilcoxes, and the struggling Basts — collide and connect in Edwardian England around the meaning of a country house and the possibilities of human connection.

Alexandra Bergson inherits her immigrant father's Nebraska farm and builds it into a prosperous enterprise over decades, while the land itself becomes the novel's most enduring presence.

Lily Bart, beautiful, brilliant, and financially precarious, navigates New York society's marriage market and slowly loses ground in a game she was not born to win.

In Puritan Boston, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet 'A' for adultery — but it is the hidden guilt of her lover, the Reverend Dimmesdale, that slowly destroys him.

The mythological history of Middle-earth, from the creation of the world by the god-like Ainur through the ages of the Elves, the forging of the Silmarils, and the great wars of the First Age — assembled posthumously by Christopher Tolkien from his father's lifelong writings.