A collection of fifteen short stories that form a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the twentieth century.

An adventure novel telling of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of a whaler, to take revenge on Moby Dick, the white whale that bit off his leg on a previous voyage.

A satirical novella that tells the story of a young man, Candide, who grows up indoctrinated with an optimistic philosophy by his mentor, until he is confronted with the reality of hardship and suffering in the world.

A collection of Middle-Eastern folk tales compiled during the Islamic Golden Age, framed by the story of a sultan and his wife Scheherazade, who stays alive through her storytelling — including 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves' and 'Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.'

The first in the James Bond series of spy novels: it begins with the British secret agent gambling at the casino in Royale-les-Eaux to bankrupt Le Chiffre, the treasurer of a French union.

A novel narrating the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of a plantation owner in Georgia, who must use every means at her disposal to survive poverty following the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War.

A novel about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are shaped and constrained by rigid social rules and obligations.

A short story narrating the unwelcome visit of a blind friend of the narrator's wife for dinner.

An Ancient Greek pastoral novel that tells the love story and adventures of a couple of young shepherds. It is one of the most ancient predecessors of the modern novel.

A loosely autobiographical novel, told through letters written by Werther, a young artist who falls in love with a woman already engaged to another man — one of the most influential novels of the Romantic movement.

Narrates the last moments and bitter memories of a writer fatally injured while on safari in Africa.

Also known as The Metamorphoses, this Ancient Roman novel tells the story of Lucius, who accidentally turns himself into a donkey while practicing magic, and sets out on a long journey to recover his human form. It is the only Ancient Roman novel in Latin to survive in its entirety.

A collection of novelle (short stories) told by a group of young men and women sheltering in a secluded villa just outside Florence to escape the Black Death.

An adventure novel narrating the story of the English aristocrat Phileas Fogg and his newly employed French valet Passepartout, as they attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club.

A science-fiction novel, written in parallel with the film of the same name directed by Stanley Kubrick. It narrates a voyage to Jupiter of a human crew with the sentient computer Hal after the discovery of a mysterious black monolith affecting human evolution.

A novel based on the author's experience with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald toward the end of the Second World War.

A novel in seven volumes that follows the narrator's recollections of childhood and adulthood during late-nineteenth- to early-twentieth-century upper-class France.

A socialist-realist novel portraying the life of a woman who works in a Russian factory doing hard manual labour amid poverty, hunger, and revolutionary unrest.

A thriller novel that follows an American symbologist after a murder in the Louvre Museum in Paris, when he becomes involved in a battle between powerful enemies over a religious mystery.

A gothic mystery that begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the crumbling house of his friend, Roderick Usher, after receiving a letter from him.

A Russian novel narrating the story of a married aristocrat and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. It is regarded as one of the most accomplished realist novels ever written.

A philosophical novel narrating the experiences of antihero Ferdinand Bardamu during the First World War and his subsequent life in colonial Africa and bourgeois France, expressing a cynical view of human nature and society.

A psychological novel recounting the life of Hikaru Genji, son of an ancient Japanese emperor, while describing the customs of aristocratic society in the Heian period — considered the earliest predecessor of the modern novel in the Eastern tradition.

Set in the roaring Jazz Age, the green light glimpsed across the bay is one of the most famous symbols in American literature.

A novel with many characters and crisscrossing plotlines that revolve around the distinction between an original and its copy — a novel-within-a-novel, with Édouard, the alter ego of Gide, intending to write a book of the same title.

A gothic mystery about a London lawyer who investigates the relationship between his reputable friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.

Chronicles the French invasion of Russia and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society through the stories of five Russian aristocratic families — regarded as a central work of Russian literature.

An epic poem following the hero Odysseus on his ten-year journey home after the Trojan War, facing monsters, gods, and temptation the whole way.

Depicts the brutality of slavery in the southern United States and pleads for Christian love to overcome cruelty. A bestseller at the time, it helped further the abolitionist cause.

A novel in which Holden Caulfield, a teenager from New York City, describes events from December 1949, as he tries to deal with his feelings of anguish and alienation from society.

A naturalistic novel narrating the story of a young migrant worker who arrives at the forbidding coal-mining town of Montsou in the far north of France to earn a living as a miner.

An epistolary novel telling the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two rivals and ex-lovers who use seduction as a weapon to control and exploit others.

A detective novel about a young woman who hires Sam Spade to find her missing sister, drawing him into the search for a jewel-encrusted statuette of a falcon.

Tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter from an affair and struggles to build a new life of dignity in a seventeenth-century Puritan colony in Massachusetts.

Tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who, after being visited by the ghost of his former business partner and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.

A complex, multifaceted postmodern novel centred on a junior tennis academy and a nearby substance-abuse recovery centre, touching with humour and melancholy on addiction, entertainment, family, and tennis.

A philosophical novel narrating the lives of two women, two men, and a dog, exploring the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society from the Prague Spring of 1968 through the Soviet invasion and its aftermath.

A political allegory about a farm where animals revolt against their human owners, only to become enslaved and exploited by the pigs, who establish a new system as oppressive as the previous one.

An unfinished modernist novel considered one of the most significant European novels of the twentieth century, set during the last days of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, with a winding plot exploring humanity, society, and identity.

A collection of sacred texts that Jews and Christians consider a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans, containing narratives, songs, codes, chronicles, proverbs, letters, and other writings from many authors and eras.

A children's fantasy novel that narrates the quest of Bilbo Baggins, a home-loving hobbit, together with the wizard Gandalf and a party of thirteen dwarves, to recover the treasure guarded by Smaug the dragon.

Tells the story of Hans Castorp, who visits his tubercular cousin in a Swiss Alps sanatorium and ends up staying there for seven years, until the First World War concludes.

Told in the form of a conference given by an ape named Red Peter, who explains to his scientific audience how he learned to behave like a civilised human — and how it changed him.

Its title is the temperature at which paper is said to catch fire — a fitting name for a novel set in a future where books are outlawed and burned.

La Comédie humaine is a multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society during the Restoration and the July Monarchy, including such novels as Père Goriot and Lost Illusions.

A short story presented as the personal diary of a minor civil servant in Russia during the repressive era of Nicholas I, as he descends into insanity.

A German fairy tale that recounts the ordeal of a young brother and sister kidnapped by a witch living in a forest house built of candy.

Included in the anthology Ficciones, this story tells of Ireneo Funes, a man who acquires a prodigious memory after a head injury and can remember every single detail of his experiences.

A novel written in the form of a personal diary chronicling a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single working woman living in London.

Presented as an autobiography, this novel follows a castaway who spends twenty-eight years on a remote tropical island, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before ultimately being rescued.

Tells the story of several generations of the Buendía family, whose patriarch founds the town of Macondo. Its magical-realist style helped establish the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

A utopian science-fiction novel set on two different planets, each dominated by a rival political and economic system — one capitalist and patriarchal, the other claiming to rule in the name of the proletariat.

Generally considered the first and one of the greatest modern novels: a middle-aged, impoverished country squire, deluded by his readings of chivalric romances, recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, and sets out to revive chivalry and bring justice to the world.

Written when Shelley was only 18 years old, it is often called the first true work of science fiction — and the "monster" in it is never actually given a name.

Tells the story of Marlow's obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, as he sets out to find him in the most remote parts of the Congo River basin.

Tells the story of an epic battle between an aging, experienced fisherman, Santiago, and a large marlin near the coast of Cuba.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman purports to be the autobiography of its eponymous character. Its digressive style, marked by double entendre and graphic devices, has been highly influential.

A satirical novel narrating the adventures of Lemuel Gulliver, repeatedly shipwrecked in distant, imaginary lands inhabited by civilisations and creatures that mock aspects of human nature and society.

A novel narrating the protagonist's search for meaning on a trip across the Western United States. The book had a significant influence on the hippie counterculture of the 1960s.

Depicts pre- and post-colonial life in late-nineteenth-century Nigeria through the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo leader and local wrestling champion in the fictional village of Umuofia.

Chronicles an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom in Dublin, constructed as an ironic parallel to Homer's Odyssey. It is one of the most influential works of modernist literature.

A lyrical, elegiac short story narrating the infatuation of a Tokyo student with a young dancing girl during a brief encounter with her family of itinerant performers on the Izu Peninsula.

The first short story featuring the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, engaged here in solving a mystery involving European royalty.

An existentialist novel about a dejected historian who experiences, with a sense of nausea, how reality encroaches on his intellectual and spiritual freedom.

A short story focusing on a conversation between an American man and a woman at a Spanish train station while waiting for a train to Madrid.

An unfinished (at the time of writing) series of epic fantasy novels narrating conflicts between rival kingdoms in the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos.

A novel telling the story of writer Anna Wulf through fragments of her notebooks, which intermingle different aspects of her personal, political, and creative life.

A modernist novel narrating, through montage and multiple points of view, the story of Franz Biberkopf, a convicted man who comes out of prison and struggles to survive in the underworld of Berlin during the interwar years.

A novel about a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures.

An epic fantasy novel following a party of hobbits, two men, a dwarf, an elf, and a wizard on a journey through Middle Earth to destroy a ring that could give absolute power to the Dark Lord Sauron.

A philosophical novel consisting of a series of dramatic monologues in which the protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, reflects upon his life to a stranger.

The first novel in the Harry Potter series: it tells the story of a young wizard who discovers his magical heritage as he makes friends (and a few enemies) in his first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

A modernist novel narrating a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional upper-class woman in post-First-World-War England.

A novel narrating the travels of two countercultural characters across the United States, living as intensely as possible against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use — a defining work of the Beat generation.

Traces the religious and intellectual awakening of young Stephen Dedalus, a fictional alter ego of Joyce, as he rebels against the conventions under which he has grown, culminating in his self-exile from Ireland.

Narrates thirty years in the life of the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats struggling with the dissolution of their family and its reputation.

A historical novel, part legend and part history, set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty, following the feudal lords who tried to replace or restore it.

A short story about a pair of criminals who enter a restaurant seeking to kill a boxer who is hiding out for unknown reasons. Hemingway's minimalist, objective narration here was highly influential.

Follows Janie Crawford through three marriages as she searches for her own voice and identity in the American South.

A comic morality tale narrating the life of Tom Jones, exploring human nature and the contrast between virtue and evil in society.

A dystopian novel so influential it gave English new words and phrases — "Big Brother," "doublethink," and "thoughtcrime" all come from this book.

A novel written in the second person, telling the story of a middle-aged man who takes the train from Paris to Rome to pay someone an unannounced visit.

A novella narrating the agonising experience of Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman who wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect and becomes estranged from his own family.

Tells the story of the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and bank foreclosures during the Great Depression.

A novel presented as a 999-line poem titled 'Pale Fire,' written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a lengthy commentary by Shade's neighbour and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote.

Follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley amid their friends and families during and after the Napoleonic Wars.

A short story narrating a brief, forbidden encounter between a married man and a married woman during a storm in nineteenth-century Louisiana.

A historical novel set in Carthage during the 3rd century BC, immediately before and during the Mercenary Revolt that followed the First Punic War.

A philosophical novel about a handsome young man who makes a Faustian bargain that lets him stay forever young and beautiful, while his portrait ages and records all of his excesses.

An avant-garde novel, considered one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language, written in a largely idiosyncratic language that blends standard English with neologistic multilingual puns and portmanteau words.

A French novel narrating the story of Emma Bovary, the wife of a doctor, who has affairs and lives beyond her means to escape the emptiness of provincial life — considered one of the masterpieces of realist narrative.

A medieval novel chronicling the life of the eponymous hero, a nobleman who follows his religious vocation and is eventually elected as Pope. It is a major work of literature written in Catalan and one of the earliest predecessors of the modern European novel.

A modernist novel centred on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

A modernist novel consisting entirely of a disjointed monologue from the perspective of an unnamed, immobile protagonist.

Narrates the romantic ups and downs of the three Dashwood sisters as they move with their widowed mother from their family home.

A post-apocalyptic short novel telling the journey of a father and his young son across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed most of life and civilisation.

Depicts the personal growth of an orphan nicknamed Pip, as he tries to escape poverty amid England's industrial expansion.

A philosophical novel set in nineteenth-century Russia dealing with debates about God, free will, and morality — a drama of faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernising Russia, with a plot that revolves around patricide.

A collection of science-fiction short stories sharing a common narrative frame and the theme of interaction between humans and robots.

Chronicles the attempts of a provincial young man to rise socially through talent, hard work, and deception. The title refers to the tension between the clerical (black) and secular (red) interests of the protagonist.

An Ancient Greek epic poem set during the ten-year siege of Troy, telling of the battles and events dominated by a quarrel between King Agamemnon and the warrior Achilles. It is the most influential work of ancient literature in the Western tradition.

Follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad Newsome, his widowed fiancée's supposedly wayward son. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether's point of view.

Probably the most famous love story in the English language, though Shakespeare adapted the plot from earlier Italian tales rather than inventing it himself.

An English novel narrating the emotions and experiences of its eponymous heroine, including her growth to adulthood and her love for Mr Rochester.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, narrated by young Scout Finch as her father defends a Black man falsely accused of a crime in Depression-era Alabama.

A short story about an innocent, loyal peasant girl named Félicité who takes up work in a widow's house as a servant.

A romance novel that narrates the emotional development of Elizabeth Bennet, who learns the error of hasty judgements and comes to appreciate the difference between the superficial and the essential.

A Russian novel about the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who kills an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money.

Told by an unnamed narrator who attempts to demonstrate his own sanity while describing a murder he committed.

A postmodern novel framed by a story about a reader trying to read a book with the same title as the novel itself.