Best Classics Books

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.

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.

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.

In the World State of 632 AF (After Ford), human beings are hatched in hatcheries, conditioned from birth for their social function, and kept content by the pleasure drug Soma. There is no disease, no war, no poverty — and no freedom, no art, no genuine love. Bernard Marx begins to question whether happiness without meaning is worth having.

The adventures of the deluded knight Alonso Quijano — who believes himself to be the knight-errant Don Quixote — and his earthy squire Sancho Panza across the plains of La Mancha.

Humbert Humbert's confession of his obsession with and abuse of twelve-year-old Dolores Haze — told in prose of devastating beauty by a narrator who is both brilliant and monstrous.

A single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, preparing a party in postwar London — intercut with the experiences of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran she will never meet.

Bertie Wooster decides to handle matters himself for once, without Jeeves. He will sort out Gussie Fink-Nottle's love life and Tuppy Glossop's engagement without the butler's assistance. The resulting catastrophe — culminating in a prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury Grammar School — is the funniest extended sequence in English comic fiction.

Shūsaku Endō's masterpiece of faith and doubt. A young Portuguese Jesuit smuggles himself into seventeenth-century Japan during the brutal persecution of Christians, only to confront the apparent silence of God in the face of unbearable suffering.

Bertie Wooster is dispatched to Totleigh Towers, home of the terrifying Roderick Spode and the magistrate Sir Watkyn Bassett, to steal a silver cow creamer and assist various friends with their tangled romantic lives. Only Jeeves can navigate the catastrophe that follows.

Ernest Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning novella about an aging Cuban fisherman's epic struggle with a great marlin in the waters of the Gulf Stream.

Primo Levi's luminous memoir in twenty-one chapters, each named for a chemical element. A chemist and Auschwitz survivor, Levi weaves the story of his life, his Piedmontese Jewish heritage, his craft, and his survival into a meditation on matter, humanity, and meaning.

A mysterious widow arrives at the crumbling Wildfell Hall with her young son and refuses to explain her past — until her diary reveals she fled an abusive, alcoholic husband in an act of defiance that Victorian society considered scandalous and illegal.

Josef K. is arrested one morning without explanation, prosecuted by an opaque authority for an unnamed crime, and gradually consumed by a legal process he can never understand.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's landmark 1892 short story. Confined to a room and forbidden to work or write as a 'rest cure' for nervous depression, a woman becomes obsessed with the room's hideous yellow wallpaper, descending into a madness that doubles as a devastating indictment of how women were treated.

Charles Portis's beloved Western. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross sets out to avenge her murdered father, hiring the drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn to hunt the killer into Indian Territory — a tale told in Mattie's unforgettable, flinty voice.

A prequel and counter-narrative to Jane Eyre that reclaims the voice of Bertha Mason — Rochester's 'mad wife' — reimagined as Antoinette Cosway, a white Creole heiress in post-Emancipation Jamaica caught between two worlds and belonging to neither.

Captain Charles Ryder, quartered in a stately home during the Second World War, recalls his long entanglement with the Flyte family — the beautiful, dissolute Sebastian; his magnetic sister Julia; and the great house of Brideshead itself — and how Catholicism shaped and ultimately claimed them all.

A spiteful, self-contradicting underground man addresses us from his Petersburg apartment — a novella that inaugurated modern psychological fiction and anticipated existentialism by seventy years.

Stanisław Lem's classic of philosophical science fiction. On a station orbiting the planet Solaris, scientists confront a vast, sentient ocean that resurrects their most painful memories in living form, forcing a reckoning with the limits of human understanding.