George Saunders' first novel made him just
the second American to win Britain's highest literary award, the Man Booker
Prize. The novel is set immediately after the death of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old
son Willie during the US civil war. Historical fact mixes with supernatural
elements as Willie's death raises an array of talkative ghosts, 166 to be
exact, from the “bardo”, a Tibetan version of the afterlife. Saunders's
enlivening imagination runs wild in detailing the ghosts' bizarre
manifestations, but melancholy is the novel's dominant tone”, says Publishers
Weekly.
“With her disarming, intimate, completely
accessible voice, and dry sense of humour, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups
and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck”, says GoodReads, which calls the book a “candid, hilarious
look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of
maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself”. Ephron speaks frankly
and uproariously about life as a woman of a certain age. Courageous, wickedly
funny and unexpectedly moving in its truth-telling, this is a book of wisdom,
advice and laugh-out-loud moments.
Tara Westover, who grew up in a Mormon
commune in Idaho, didn’t see the inside of a classroom until she was seventeen,
but it was an experience that dramatically changed the trajectory of her life.
Voted the number one book of the year by Amazon book editors, who called it
their “hands-down favourite”, Westover’s “stirring memoir chronicles how she
survived her survivalist upbringing, eventually earning a PhD from Cambridge
University” and is “a rousing reminder that knowledge is, indeed, power”
says Business Insider.
In 2010, the Man Booker Prize for fiction
went to the English novelist Howard Jacobson for The Finkler
Question, a humorous exploration of Jewishness and the first time in the
prize’s history that it went to an out-and-out comic novel. “Full of wit,
warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding”, this novel is “also
beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the
authentic writer” says The Guardian.
When Otto Frank was liberated from the
Auschwitz Nazi death camp in January 1945, he found he was the only member of
his family left alive – but the diary his daughter Anne had kept during the two
years they spent hiding in an Amsterdam attic had survived. He was persuaded to
have the diary translated into English and published. Today, it is perhaps the
best-read book about the Second World War and is particularly accessible to
teenagers, with Anne’s chatty confidences about boys and her family. “Her book
is not a classic to be left on the library shelf”, says The New York Times, “it is a warm and stirring confession,
to be read over and over for insight and enjoyment”.
Beloved is “one of the few American novels that take every
natural element of the novel form and exploit it thoroughly, but in balance
with all the other elements”, says novelist Jane Smiley in The Guardian. The result is that it is “likely to mould or
change a reader’s sense of the world”. Set in the mid-1800s in the aftermath of
the American Civil War, Beloved follows the story of Sethe who is haunted by the violent trauma she endured when
enslaved at Sweet Home, Kentucky.
Revival is one of the most critically acclaimed works by
bestselling crime and horror writer Stephen King. The 2014 novel begins with
the arrival of a new Methodist minister in early 1960s Maine. “The sheer
strangeness of the story, along with King’s ability to pull you along through
his sprawling literary canvas, makes Revival one of King’s most
enjoyable reads”, says Vox.
Wolf Hall, the first novel in Hilary Mantel’s historical
trilogy, tells the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to power in the court of
Henry VIII and has been adapted into both a BBC miniseries and a Royal
Shakespeare Company stage production. “Thomas Cromwell remains a controversial
and mysterious figure,” says The New York Times’ 2009 review. “Mantel has filled in the
blanks plausibly, brilliantly”, and “its 500-plus pages turn quickly, winged
and falconlike”.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is an indisputable
modern classic. The gripping reverse-murder mystery follows a group of New
England college students who discover a way of thinking and living that is a
world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. “Whether you
decide it’s a brilliant exposé of the innate darkness of human nature or simply
the implausible tale of indulged rich kids who like a bit of sexual deviancy is
up to you,” says The Sunday Times. “Either way, it’s a page-turner that will
keep you guessing until the end.”
Experimental writer and Londoner Bernardine Evaristo shared the 2019 Booker Prize, becoming the
first black woman to win. Girl, Woman, Other features 12
characters and is written in a blend of poetry and prose. “If you want to
understand modern day Britain, this is the writer to read,” says the New Statesman, calling the book “a story for our times”.
In a totalitarian future, women's rights are
suddenly and severely restricted – those who are incapable of integrating with
the ideals of the new regime are banished to “the Colonies to clean
radioactive waste, while fertile young women are kept as "handmaids",
forced to bear children for elite couples. “Often labelled a feminist dystopia,
the novel captivates and terrifies in equal measure”, says The Guardian.
The 2020 Boozer Prize winner is a tale
of poverty, addiction and abuse set in and around Glasgow in the 1980s. Shuggie Bain’s mother is an alcoholic; his father, a
violent, fitfully present taxi driver. As family members drift away, he becomes
his mother’s sole carer – and it is their relationship that forms the novel’s
emotional core. Shuggie Bain "does
what all good fiction should and makes you walk in the scuffed trainers of
people who live very different lives,” says Robbie Millen in The Times.
Cormac McCarthy's bleak saga sees a father
and his young son traverse post-apocalyptic America, the land torched and
barren from an unnamed catastrophe, with nothing but a small stockpile of
supplies and a pistol at their disposal. Cannibal gangs, sickness and lack of
food threaten their survival as they head south towards the coast, where they
hope to flee the coming winter. “The Road would be pure misery if
not for its stunning, savage beauty,” says Janet Maslin in the New
York Times.
Edith Wharton’s second novel is “a
masterpiece that remains electrifying and relevant in our 21st century,”
says The Guardian. The tragic, ahead-of-its-time tale - thought
to be one inspiration for the hit TV show Gossip Girl - follows
forward-thinking heroine Lily Bart as she moves through New York high
society. “Edith Wharton guides us through genial banter, cutting sarcasm,
pouting prettiness, devastating beauty, comedy and tragedy and we follow her
trail,” writes Alyson Rudd in The Times.
This landmark novel by Colombia’s most
beloved author, Gabriel García Márquez, is a postmodern masterpiece. Telling
the story of seven generations of the Buendía family
and of Macondo, the town they built, it should be “required reading for the
entire human race”, The New York Times said. According to Literary Hub “there are hits, and then there are smash
hits, and then there are rocket ships to Mars - One Hundred Years of
Solitude would qualify as the last”.
Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel
reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their
children. Subtitled A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its
Consequences, it actually began as a New York Times murder story that
became transformed into a tale of “spine-tingling suspense and extraordinary
intuition”, says The Guardian.
Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, or The
Whale, was first published in October 1851. Though it was “not an
immediate hit, and Melville didn’t live to see the fame his book would
achieve”, it would eventually become one of “American literature’s most famous
and beloved works of genius”, says Time.
Fully titled The Pilgrim’s Progress from
This World to That Which is to Come is a Christian allegory - a story in
which people, places and events represent abstract concepts, the British Library explains. Regarded as one of the most
significant works of religious fiction in English literature, it has been
claimed as one of the ten most published books of all time.
Mark Twain’s story of a boy’s journey down
the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American
frontier as no other work had done before. A witty, satirical tale of childhood
rebellion, it remains a “defining classic of American literature”, says Robert
McCrum in The Guardian.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s third novel won the Man
Booker Prize for Fiction in 1989. A contemporary classic, The Remains of
the Day is a beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in
a Great English House, of lost causes and lost love. It was ranked as one of
the 25 greatest British novels in a BBC Culture poll.
Published in two volumes in 1605 and 1615 by
Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote - the first modern
novel - “remains the finest”, says The Guardian’s Harold Bloom. It’s widely regarded to be the
best literary work ever written and Bloom argues that “only Shakespeare comes
close to Cervantes’ genius”.
Told from the perspective of Nick Carraway,
who is befriended by eccentric neighbour Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
classic provides an “insider’s look into the Jazz Age of the 1920s in United
States history, while at the same time critiquing the idea of the American
Dream”, says Britannica. Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has become a
“tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art”, says The Guardian’s Robert McCrum.
With more than 18 million copies in print and
translated into 40 languages, Harper Lee’s classic novel set in America’s
racist south won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and is today regarded as a
“masterpiece of American literature”, says GoodReads. Through the young
eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores with exuberant humour the
irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the
1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is
pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice.
Grab your golden tickets and head to Willy
Wonka’s chocolate factory for a grand tour. Described as a “startling work of
fantasy” by the Independent, Dahl’s classic features Charlie Bucket as the
hero and he is joined at the chocolate factory by some nasty little beasts
called Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde and Mike Teavee.
Written by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting
Murasaki Shikibu during the early 11th century, The Tale of Genji is often referred to as the first
novel, although it wasn’t translated into English until the 19th century.
Despite its age, the book remains a remarkable and insightful read, telling the
story of Prince Genji, the son of an emperor,
whose love affairs and shifting political fortunes offer a glimpse of the
golden age of Japan. The Washington Post calls it a “world-class
masterpiece of fiction” that “rivals the classic novels of the West in
artfulness and psychological depth”.
Ambitious and unusual, The Plot
Against America tells an alternate version of 20th-century history in
which aviator and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh wins the Republican nomination
for US president for the 1940 election and defeats Franklin Roosevelt. The
fictionalised history is told from the perspective of Philip Roth as a child,
depicting Lindbergh’s landslide victory and an ensuing treaty with Hitler in
which Lindbergh promises that the US won’t interfere in the Second World War.
When it comes to Austen, it is
a “near-impossible choice” between Emma and her seminal
novel Pride and Prejudice, says The Observer’s Robert McCrum. But he chooses Emma,
saying it “never fails to fascinate and annoy”. The protagonist Emma Woodhouse,
from the fictional village of Highbury, plays matchmaker and meddles in
the lives of her fellow inhabitants to devastating effect.
First published under the pseudonym Ellis
Bell, Wuthering Heights was the only novel written by Emily
Bronte, the second-youngest of the Bronte siblings, and she died a year after
its publication at the age of 30. “The scope and drift of its imagination, its
passionate exploration of a fatal yet regenerative love affair, and its
brilliant manipulation of time and space put it in a league of its own,” writes
McCrum in The Observer. “This is great English literature, the
fruit of a quite extraordinary childhood.”
Great Expectations is a sprawling epic that tells the coming-of-age
tale of the orphan Pip, with a few biting social critiques along the way. The
jilted Miss Havisham, with her faded wedding dress and decaying cake, is also
among the writer’s most intriguing characters. “Dickens achieved
perfection with this gothic masterpiece,” says The Independent.
Middlemarch is quintessentially British, taking the number one
spot in BBC Culture’s greatest British novels poll in 2015. A book
of sweeping historical importance, it details some of the more significant
geopolitical events of the early 19th century, including the 1832 Reform Act,
the beginnings of the railways and the death of King George IV. “Anti-romantic,
yet intensely passionate, it is one of the greatest novels of all,” says Booker
Prize winner A.S. Byatt in The Guardian.
Leo Tolstoy’s idea for this tale of a doomed
adulteress's affair with a rich count reportedly grew from a daydream of “a
bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”, says The Daily Telegraph. The result was what Nobel Prize
laureate William Faulkner believed was the finest novel ever written. The book
tells the story of the “sensuous and rebellious” titular character in her
affair with the dashing officer Count Vronsky, before tragedy unfolds as Anna
rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society.
My Antonia is the final book in Willa Cather's “prairie trilogy”
of novels - along with O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark - lyrical,
sweeping epics of the prairie, whose vivid evocation of the untamed Midwest and
the pioneers who made it their home can stir up a powerful sense of nostalgia
even in a reader who has never set foot in the US. “A writer of great skill,
Cather produced a lush, romantic work that is a superb read,” says the Los Angeles Review of Books.
One of the most important modernist novels of
all time, James Joyce’s bizarre, dense magnum opus Ulysses has
been described by The Atlantic as “a deeply humanistic novel which
is bursting with the enormous variety of life”. The story, characterised
by a stream of consciousness narrative that changes focus wildly, concerns the
meeting of two Irishmen, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, in 1904 Dublin.
The storms of the Great Depression - and the
subsequent Dust Bowl - had barely settled when Steinbeck penned The Grapes
of Wrath, an astonishing work of realist American writing. The book
follows a family of impoverished “Okies” as they head out west in hope of a
better life but, as Time says, they “find only bitterness, squalor and
oppression as migrant agricultural workers living in Hoovervilles”.
The magazine says it is “both a record of its time and a permanent monument to
human perseverance”.
A list of 100 Books of the 20th Century
compiled by French publication Le Monde places Albert Camus’s existential, absurdist
debut novel L’Étranger (The
Stranger) at the top. Through the story of an ordinary man
“unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach”, Camus
used his seminal 1942 novel to explore what he termed “the nakedness of man
faced with the absurd”, says GoodReads.
Nabokov’s extraordinary - and controversial -
novel Lolita is a work of such poetic agility that it
makes perhaps the most taboo subject tackled by 20th-century literature seem
almost normal. In it, poet Humbert Humbert becomes
obsessed with 12-year-old Dolores Haze and seeks to possess her by
becoming her stepfather. “Published in 1955, it is many things: a love story;
by its own admission a disturbing tale of child abuse; an elaborate game of
language, rhythm and subtext, and much more,” The Independent says.
“The theme of preserving cultural history in
the face of Western domination in this novel gave voice to the oppressed people
in Africa and caught the attention of the world,” says the Open Education Database, of Things Fall Apart,
written by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe. This classic novel is still
widely read and studied as a searing and poetic critique of the damaging
colonialist attitudes that permeates geopolitics.
Set in 1969 in the southern Indian state of
Kerala, Arundhati Roy’s debut novel The God of Small Things starts
with a harrowing scene: memories of a family grieving around a drowned child's
coffin. This story of family in the Indian caste system won the Man Booker
Prize upon its release, and was described by The New York Times as “so extraordinary - at once so
morally strenuous and so imaginatively supple - that the reader remains
enthralled all the way through to its agonising finish”.
In 2009, literature site The Millions polled a panel of writers, editors
and critics to determine the best book of the 21st century. The
Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s satirical family drama based in the
Midwestern United States, was the winner “by a landslide”. “At its centre is
the Lambert family, dominated by Alfred, the difficult patriarch, and Enid, the
yearning and frustrated matriarch,” The Guardian said in a review at the time. “Three
grown-up children, Gary, Chip and Denise, labour to live adult lives under the
long shadow cast by their unhappy parents.”
“Are we ready for a novel about an imploding
nation riven by religious strife and bloody wrangling over who controls the
military, the civil service, the oil; a novel about looting, roadside bombs,
killings and reprisal killings, set against a backdrop of meddling foreign
powers?” The New York Times asked upon the release of Half
of a Yellow Sun in 2006. The book tells the story of the Biafran
War (or Nigerian Civil War) and its impact on civilian life through the eyes
of Odenigbo, a radical university professor, his
young girlfriend Olanna and a shy English writer Richard. The Seattle Times calls the book “a sweeping story
that provides both a harrowing history lesson and an engagingly human
narrative”.