Best Classic Literature Books

Set in a twenty-first century England that has adopted republican government, Mary Shelley's visionary 1826 novel follows Lionel Verney as a plague sweeps across the world, wiping out humanity one country at a time, until he walks the earth alone — the last human survivor. One of the earliest and most devastating pandemic novels ever written.

An alternate history set in an Axis-occupied America where the Allies lost WWII — Philip K. Dick's Hugo Award-winning masterwork of speculative fiction.

Gwynplaine, whose mouth was surgically carved into a permanent grin as a child by a gang called the Comprachicos, grows up as a carnival performer and discovers he is an English peer. Hugo's most melodramatic novel is also his most direct examination of disfigurement, spectacle, and the face made into a mask by forces outside the self.

Isabel Archer, a spirited American woman, inherits a fortune and goes to Europe seeking freedom and experience — only to make a catastrophically wrong marriage. James's defining novel is the supreme portrait of a consciousness discovering the limits of its own idealism.

On Egdon Heath, Clym Yeobright returns from Paris to improve the lives of the local people through education. His plans collide with the ambitions of Eustacia Vye, who yearns to escape the heath, and with the web of desire and disappointment that connects them both to others.

The direct sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front follows the surviving soldiers as they return to a Germany that has changed beyond recognition — where their sacrifice is simultaneously celebrated and disregarded, and where the civilian world has no framework for what they have seen. Remarque's second novel asks what happens after the war ends: harder to read and less celebrated than its predecessor, but in some ways more honest.

Rousseau asks how humans can be both free and subject to law. His answer — the social contract, by which individuals submit to the general will — became the theoretical foundation of modern democracy, influenced the French Revolution, and is still the starting point for thinking about legitimate political authority.

A three-week love affair between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox, a young Black woman, in San Francisco's North Beach — narrated in the long, breath-driven sentences Kerouac developed from jazz improvisation. Written in three nights, his most formally concentrated novel.

A young governess at a remote English estate becomes convinced that the children in her charge are in contact with the malevolent spirits of two dead servants.

Smith's investigation into the causes of national prosperity — the division of labour, free markets, the price system, and the folly of mercantilism. Published in 1776, it became the foundational text of modern economics and the primary intellectual source for arguments in favour of market capitalism.

Tom Jones, a foundling of unknown parentage raised by the good-natured Squire Allworthy, is in love with the beautiful Sophia Western. Expelled from the estate, he travels toward London through a comic series of adventures, misidentifications, and encounters with English society at every level. Fielding's masterpiece and the most important comic novel in English before Dickens.

Razumov, a Russian student in St Petersburg, witnesses a fellow student's assassination of a government minister — and is forced to choose between betraying his colleague to the police or destroying his own future. Conrad's most explicitly political novel is a study of betrayal, guilt, and the way political ideology consumes individual moral life.

Country girl Polly Milton visits fashionable Boston and discovers that her plain, warm, old-fashioned values stand in refreshing contrast to the shallow vanities of city society — and later returns to prove her independence as a working woman.

Kerouac retreats to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur to escape fame and alcohol, fails to escape either, and has a breakdown. His most autobiographically honest novel is also his darkest — the romantic road narrative collapsed into the specific hell of alcoholism and celebrity.

Descartes's account of how he came to doubt everything that could be doubted and arrived at the one certainty that could not be doubted — I think, therefore I am (cogito ergo sum). The founding document of modern Western philosophy, written in French rather than Latin to be readable by non-specialists.

Joyce's final novel is written in a multilingual dream-prose of puns, portmanteaux, and allusions, narrating the sleep and dream of HCE in a Dublin pub. The greatest single act of formal ambition in the novel's history.

Scout Finch, now Jean Louise and twenty-six, returns to Maycomb from New York to visit her father — and discovers that Atticus Finch holds views on race and segregation she cannot reconcile with the man she idolized.

Jo March, now married to Professor Bhaer, runs Plumfield School for boys, where she and her husband put their progressive educational ideals into practice with a diverse cast of boys each needing something different from school.

Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov recognises, as a juror at a murder trial, the woman he seduced and abandoned years before. Overcome by guilt, he follows Katyusha Maslova through the Russian prison and exile system — a journey that becomes Tolstoy's most sustained indictment of the state, the church, and the landed class.

Set in fifteenth-century Florence during the life of Savonarola, Eliot's most researched novel follows Romola, daughter of a blind scholar, whose Greek husband Tito Melema is one of fiction's most precisely observed depictions of moral deterioration by small increments.

Sara Crewe arrives at Miss Minchin's London boarding school as a wealthy, imaginative girl; when her father dies penniless, she is reduced to a servant's life but maintains her dignity through storytelling and the power of her own inner world.

Olive Chancellor, a Boston reformer and feminist, discovers the young Verena Tarrant, whose natural gift for public speaking makes her ideal for the women's suffrage cause. Olive's relationship with Verena is complicated by the arrival of her Southern cousin Basil Ransom, who wants to marry Verena and remove her from public life.

A retelling of the medieval legend of Gregorius — a man born of incest who unknowingly marries his own mother and atones by living on a rocky island for seventeen years before being elected Pope — Mann's most playful late novel.

Gregory Reeves grows up among Latinos in East Los Angeles, serves in Vietnam, becomes a lawyer in San Francisco, and tries to outrun the poverty and violence of his childhood. Allende's first novel set in North America — a bildungsroman structured around the myth of self-invention and a portrait of the Latino community in California.