Best Classic Literature Books

When the eminent Egyptologist Abel Trelawny falls into a mysterious coma, his daughter Margaret and young barrister Malcolm Ross find themselves drawn into the terrifying legacy of an ancient Egyptian queen — and an experiment in resurrection that may unleash something the modern world is wholly unprepared for.

An Irish woman in Mexico encounters a political and religious movement attempting to revive the ancient Aztec religion and displace Christianity — Lawrence's most politically troubling and visually extraordinary novel.

Werther, a young man of sensitivity and artistic feeling, falls in love with Charlotte, who is engaged and then married to another. His inability to either act on his love or let it go leads to his suicide. Written in epistolary form by the twenty-four-year-old Goethe, the novel triggered a wave of imitative suicides across Europe.

Amory Blaine moves through Princeton and the First World War and a series of love affairs toward a nebulous self-awareness. Fitzgerald's debut novel made him famous at twenty-three and introduced the Jazz Age to American literature.

Ragle Gumm wins a newspaper contest called Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? every single day. He lives in a pleasant 1950s suburb. He begins to notice that things in his world are slightly wrong — objects dissolve, structures fail to match their descriptions, reality seems to have seams. His comfortable suburban life may be an elaborate construction.

Hawthorne's first major collection includes 'The Minister's Black Veil,' 'Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,' 'The Gray Champion,' and 'Wakefield' — stories of Puritan guilt, scientific hubris, moral allegory, and the stranger who removes himself from human society.

Melville's first novel, based on his actual time among the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands after jumping ship, is part adventure narrative, part ethnography, and part critique of Western civilization's assumptions about 'savagery.'

Chicago, 1942. Joseph, waiting to be drafted, keeps a journal for seven months. He has left his job; he cannot do anything else; he hangs in suspension. Bellow's first novel—written under the influence of Dostoevsky and Kafka—is the purest statement of the anxious intellectual that would define his career.

The boys of Plumfield are now young adults, facing real-world choices about career, marriage, and moral character, while Jo March has become a famous author and must cope with the peculiar burdens of literary celebrity.

Jude Fawley, a Dorset stonemason, dreams of university and an intellectual life. His marriage, his passion for his unconventional cousin Sue Bridehead, and society's refusal to accommodate either his ambitions or his love, grind him down. Hardy's final and darkest novel caused a scandal on publication.

A kind-hearted American boy named Cedric Errol discovers he is the heir to an English earldom, and his natural goodness gradually transforms his crusty grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt.

Written in 1819 but suppressed by Shelley's father and unpublished until 1959, Mathilda is a harrowing gothic novella about a young woman destroyed by her father's incestuous obsession and her subsequent withdrawal into grief. Autobiographical in its emotional truth, it is among the most painfully honest works Shelley ever wrote.

A dialogue in which the traveller Raphael Hythloday describes the island of Utopia — a society with communal property, religious tolerance, and rational social organisation. Written in Latin by Thomas More in 1516, the book gave the word 'utopia' (no-place) to all subsequent thinking about ideal societies.

Chopin's first novel follows Thérèse Lafirme, a Louisiana plantation widow whose moral convictions force a divorced man to remarry his alcoholic ex-wife, with tragic consequences that challenge her certainties.

J. Sutter is a junk journalist attending a press junket in Talcott, West Virginia, where the US Postal Service is issuing a John Henry commemorative stamp. Whitehead weaves Sutter's contemporary story with the legend of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced a machine and won — and then died — and various other perspectives across American history.

Stoker's final novel pits a young Englishman against an ancient, monstrous entity lurking beneath the English countryside — part gothic horror, part folk legend, part fever dream. Lady Arabella March conceals a terrifying secret in her estate, and only Adam Salton can confront the primordial evil coiled beneath Mercy Farm.

Set in fourteenth-century Italy, Valperga follows the rise of the condottiere Castruccio Castracani — a real historical figure — from boyhood idealism to tyrannical power, through the eyes of Euthanasia, the remarkable Countess of Valperga, who loves him and watches him be destroyed by ambition.

On the rugged Scottish coast near Cruden Bay, Archibald Hunter is drawn into a web of mystery involving second sight, hidden treasure connected to the Spanish Armada, and dangerous conspirators — as well as a romance with the spirited American Marjory Drake.

A historical novel about Perkin Warbeck, the pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York — the younger of the two Princes in the Tower — and whose attempt to claim the English throne from Henry VII ended in defeat and execution. Shelley treats Warbeck as a genuine prince, making the novel a sustained meditation on legitimacy, loyalty, and the human cost of failed causes.

Rupert Sent Leger inherits a fortune and travels to a Balkan land called the Land of the Blue Mountains, where he encounters a mysterious woman in a shroud who may be a vampire — or a princess in disguise. Gothic horror merges with Ruritanian adventure in Stoker's politically ambitious late novel.