Best Classic Literature Books

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.

Stephen Dedalus grows from infant to young artist through Dublin, school, religious crisis, and the discovery of aesthetic vocation. Joyce's first novel uses style itself as autobiography — the prose changes register as Stephen ages.

Sir Robert Chiltern, an upright politician, is being blackmailed by Mrs Cheveley over an early indiscretion that made his fortune and his career. Wilde's second great society comedy is his most politically serious — an examination of the gap between public virtue and private corruption, and of what an 'ideal husband' actually is when the idealism is tested.

Anne Shirley leaves Avonlea for Redmond College, where she discovers new friendships, navigates romantic confusion, and must finally decide between the persistent Roy Gardner and the friend she has always taken for granted.

Holly Golightly, a young woman from Texas who has reinvented herself as a New York socialite and escort, befriends the unnamed narrator in their brownstone. Capote's most beloved novella is a study of performance, identity, and the particular freedom available to women who refuse to be possessed by anyone.

Essay collection including 'Consider the Lobster' on the Maine Lobster Festival and animal pain, a 60-page essay on a usage dictionary, 'Up, Simba' on John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, and 'Roger Federer as Religious Experience.'

When Aristide Leonides, the wealthy patriarch of a three-generation household, is poisoned in his own home, his granddaughter Sophia asks her fiancé Charles Hayward to uncover which family member is responsible. Christie called this one of her personal favourites.

A novel based on a real 1869 political murder — a charismatic revolutionary named Stavrogin and the nihilist cell he inspires drive a provincial Russian town toward catastrophe.

After her father's death, Emily Starr goes to live with her strict Murray aunts at New Moon Farm on Prince Edward Island, where she discovers her calling as a writer and resists every pressure to suppress it.

Sasha Jensen, an aging Englishwoman alone in Paris on borrowed money, drinks and remembers and encounters a young man who may be a gigolo. Rhys's fourth novel is the most formally accomplished of her pre-Wide Sargasso Sea work — the stream-of-consciousness narration spirals inward toward a final scene that is simultaneously sexual, violent, and ambiguous. The title is from Emily Dickinson.

The companion novel to Gilead retells the same events from the perspective of John Ames's friend Robert Boughton and his prodigal son Jack — who comes home after twenty years of absence bearing a secret that would destroy his father's world.

Jim, a first mate on a passenger ship, abandons eight hundred Muslim pilgrims during an apparent emergency — and must spend the rest of his life with the knowledge of what he did. Conrad's novel of cowardice, guilt, and the impossibility of redemption is narrated by Marlow, who reconstructs Jim's story from fragments.

Philip Ashley becomes obsessed with Rachel — the widow who may have poisoned his cousin Ambrose in Italy and who may now be poisoning Philip. Du Maurier's most disturbing novel is an exercise in sustained ambiguity that never resolves.

Nine stories including 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish,' 'For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,' and 'The Laughing Man.' Salinger's story collection is the best American short fiction of the postwar period — each story structured as an epiphany that withholds its epiphanic content, leaving the reader in the resonant space of what is not quite said.

Joan Didion's second novel follows Maria Wyeth, a model and actress drifting through Los Angeles and the Nevada desert in a state of existential collapse — a portrait of a woman at the end of what she can endure.

Frédéric Moreau arrives in Paris from the provinces and spends twenty years pursuing an idealized love, a political career, wealth, and artistic ambition — achieving none of them. Flaubert's most autobiographical novel is his most devastating account of an entire generation's failure.

The fourth volume opens with the narrator's discovery that the Baron de Charlus is homosexual and follows the consequences through the upper echelons of French society — Proust's most extended treatment of same-sex desire and his most sociological.

Edna Pontellier, a married woman in nineteenth-century New Orleans, awakens to her own desires — for independence, for art, for love — in a society that offers her no way to live them.

The sixth volume of In Search of Lost Time. After Albertine flees and then dies, the narrator descends into a forensic study of grief, jealousy, and the slow, uneven work of forgetting — Proust's most piercing anatomy of love's aftermath.

Prince Lev Myshkin returns to Russia after years of Swiss treatment for epilepsy — gentle, sincere, and incapable of the social calculus that governs everyone around him. Dostoevsky's attempt to portray a truly good man, and what happens when such a man meets the world.

A British poet working in Hollywood attends a funeral at the Forest Lawn-inspired Whispering Glades and falls in love with the cosmetician for the corpses. Waugh's novella about the American funeral industry and Hollywood expatriate culture.

A series of linked stories following the colonisation of Mars by humans fleeing an increasingly troubled Earth — a work less concerned with the science of space travel than with what humanity brings with it, and what it destroys in the process.