Chapter 1
Before 1800
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Samuel Richardson, Pamela
Voltaire, Candide
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Chapter 2
1800-1870
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Stendhal, The Red and the Black
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Chapter 3
1870-1920
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Émile Zola, Germinal
Benito Pérez Galdós, Fortunata and Jacinta
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Chapter 4
1920-1950
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
James Joyce, Ulysses
Švejk Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country
George Orwell, 1984
Chapter 5
1950-1980
J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
Jack Kerouac, On the Road
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Kenzaburō Ōe, A Personal Matter
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint
Elsa Morante, History
Chapter 6
1980-Present
J.M.G. Le Clézio, Desert
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
José Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Mo Yan, Red Sorghum
Javier Marías, A Heart So White
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Michel Houellebecq, Atomised
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Orhan Pamuk, Snow
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Karl Ove Knausgård, A Death in the Family
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Index
Acknowledgements
