Best Classic Literature Books

Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family are traced from their commercial peak in 1835 to their dissolution by the turn of the century — the novel that won Mann the Nobel Prize, and the German equivalent of The Forsyte Saga.

Poirot and Hastings return to Styles Court for the last time. Poirot is elderly and gravely ill, but he has identified a murderer who has never been convicted — and he intends to act. Written during World War II, published posthumously in 1975.

Paul Pennyfeather is expelled from Oxford for indecent behaviour not his own, becomes a schoolmaster at a chaotic Welsh school, enters the English aristocracy through an engagement, and is imprisoned for white slavery not his own — Waugh's first novel and the funniest debut in the English language.

A German composer of genius makes a Faustian bargain — syphilitic infection in exchange for twenty-four years of musical creativity — as Germany makes its own bargain with Nazism. Told through the biography of his lifelong friend, Mann's most ambitious novel.

Fifteen stories of Dublin life, from childhood through public life to death, structured as an account of paralysis — the inability to escape, to act, to live fully. The collection ends with 'The Dead,' one of the greatest short stories ever written.

Sixteen years after artist Amyas Crale was poisoned, his daughter asks Poirot to clear her mother's name. Poirot interviews the five witnesses who were present that summer, and each gives a different account of the same events.

Two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, grow up in the small lakeside town of Fingerbone after their mother drives into the lake, looked after by a succession of unsuitable relatives, until their drifting aunt Sylvie arrives.

The second volume of In Search of Lost Time follows the narrator's adolescent infatuations, his deepening friendships, and above all his summer at the seaside resort of Balbec — where he meets the circle of girls, including Albertine, who will dominate his inner life.

The third Gilead novel tells the story of John Ames's young wife — the drifter Lila, who grew up in poverty on the American roads, cared for by the woman Doll who stole her as an infant — and how she came to arrive in Gilead and sit down in the back of an old preacher's church.

Fanny Price is brought from poverty to Mansfield Park, her wealthy cousins' estate, where she watches and witnesses while others perform and transgress. Austen's most morally serious novel — quieter, deeper, and more uncomfortable than her others.

Catherine Morland, a thoroughly unromantic heroine raised on gothic novels, visits Bath and then a genuine abbey and finds — to her disappointment and then relief — that real life obeys very different rules from fiction. Austen's earliest and most playful novel is a literary parody of the gothic tradition that also manages to be a sincere coming-of-age story.

An orphan boy escapes the workhouse only to fall in with a gang of London pickpockets led by the scheming Fagin. Dickens's second novel is his most socially radical — a direct attack on the Poor Laws and a vivid portrait of the Victorian criminal underworld.

A 999-line poem by fictional American poet John Shade, followed by an obsessive commentary by his neighbour Charles Kinbote — who may be the exiled king of a fictional country called Zembla. One of the most formally inventive novels ever written.

A country nature columnist is accidentally sent to cover a war in the fictional African nation of Ishmaelia by a press baron who wanted a different journalist — Waugh's satire of foreign correspondents, Fleet Street, and the construction of news.

Paul Morel grows up in a Nottinghamshire mining village, caught between his possessive mother's ambitions for him and his own desires — for art, for independence, for women who are not his mother. The first great working-class bildungsroman in English.

Dick Diver, a brilliant American psychiatrist on the French Riviera in the 1920s, has married his former patient Nicole and constructed a life of exquisite social grace — which we watch unravel across the novel.

The narrator moves to Paris and becomes obsessed with the aristocratic Guermantes family — particularly the Duchess — whose drawing rooms represent the pinnacle of French society, while his grandmother's death delivers the most affecting grief in any novel.

Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of Notre-Dame, loves the Romani dancer Esmeralda, who is pursued by the archdeacon Frollo and a captain of the guard. Hugo's second great novel is the one that made him famous and established historical fiction as a serious literary form in France.

Griffin, a scientist who has discovered how to render himself invisible, arrives at a village inn in bandages and dark glasses — and rapidly descends from scientific triumph into paranoia and violence. Wells's dark comedy is simultaneously a thriller, a satire of scientific hubris, and a warning that power without accountability corrupts absolutely.

Edward Prendick, shipwrecked and rescued, finds himself on a remote Pacific island where the reclusive Dr Moreau performs surgical experiments that transform animals into humanoid creatures who speak and live by a recited Law. Wells's most disturbing novel is a horror story, a philosophical fable about evolution and ethics, and one of science fiction's most sustained meditations on what separates humans from animals.

Henry Fleming, a young Union soldier, flees from his first battle and spends a day wrestling with cowardice and shame before returning to fight. Crane had never witnessed combat when he wrote this novel — yet his hallucinatory, impressionistic account of a single soldier's experience in the American Civil War remains the most psychologically honest war novel ever written by an American.

The second Sherlock Holmes novel weaves stolen treasure, a mysterious four-man pact, and a chase through the fog-bound Thames into a tightly plotted adventure. Watson falls in love with their client while Holmes remains coldly analytical — a contrast that gives the story much of its warmth.

The decline of the Compson family in Mississippi is told four times — by Benjy, Quentin, Jason, and a third-person narrator — each section dissolving further the coherent narrative that preceded it. Faulkner's most formally radical novel is also his most emotionally devastating: a meditation on loss, time, and the American South's refusal to grieve honestly.

Three short masterpieces: 'A Simple Heart,' in which a servant woman's life of devotion is rendered with complete moral seriousness; 'The Legend of Saint Julian Hospitator,' a medieval tale of guilt and redemption; and 'Hérodias,' a retelling of the story of Salome.