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Author: Oliver Sacks
Date: 2007
Genre: Neurology, Psychology
Country: USA

It explores a range of psychological and physiological ailments and their connections to music. It is divided into four parts, each with a distinctive theme: Haunted by Music examines mysterious onsets of musicality and musicophilia (and musicophobia); A Range of Musicality looks at musical oddities musical synesthesia; parts three and four are entitled Memory, Movement, and Music and Emotion, Identity, and Music.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1972
Genre: 
Country: USA

The short novel tells the story of Hugh Person, an American literary editor and proofreader, and his four trips to and from Switzerland over the course of almost two decades.

Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1972
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA

In these sly, laconic, and fiercely observed works, O’Connor does nothing less than elaborate a unique and new way of seeing the world. Contorting her sharply drawn characters through her Southern Gothic prism, she produces a panorama unequaled in its vision of the interplays of faith, evil, humor, violence, and compassion that embody American life.

These thirty-one chronologically ordered stories include twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O’Connor put together in her short lifetime―Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Taken together, these stories reveal O’Connor’s abiding and visionary gift―one that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century.

Author: various
Date: 2001
Genre: Poetry
Country: various

Nearly 1,000 poems with commentary on the lives and works of poets dating from the 10th century to the present.

Author: Constantine FitzGibbon
Date: 1965
Genre: Biography
Country: USA

A comprehensive 1965 biography of the Welsh poet, written by a friend who used private papers for the first full-scale account. The book details Thomas’s tumultuous life, including his career, personal struggles with debt and drink, and his eventual death in America, presenting a candid look at the poet’s life and work.

Author: Samuel Beckett
Date: 1997
Genre: Essays
Country: USA

The first novel of Samuel Beckett’s mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy’s second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologue–delivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beauty–of what might or might not be an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. Within their linguistic terrain, where stories are taken up, broken off, and taken up again, where voices rise and crumble and are resurrected, we can discern the essential lineaments of our modern condition, and encounter an awesome vision, tragic yet always compelling and always mysteriously invigorating, of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature.

Author: Eudora Welty
Date: 1984
Genre: Essays
Country: USA

In the essays, Ms. Welty explains the inescapable bond between her childhood in Mississippi and her later career as a writer. She shares details from her childhood and her relationship with her parents, Christian Welty and Chestina Andrews Welty. She discusses how these two critical relationships, and other relationships from her childhood, contributed to her literary voice. The book has been praised as revealing “the confluence of past and present as the design of Welty’s life and art by making such intersection the structural principle behind her life story as an artist.”

Author: Charles Wright
Date: 1990
Genre: Poetry
Country: USA

The World of Ten Thousand Things gathers The Southern Cross (1981), The Other Side of the River (1984), Zone Journals (1988), and a new group of poems, “Xionia,” into one volume, allowing us to see Wright’s work of the past decade as, in essence, one long poem, a meditation on self, history, and the metaphysical that is among the most ambitious and resonant creations in contemporary American poetry.

Author: Dylan Thomas
Date: 1968
Genre: Short Studies, Essays
Country: UK

Many of the 25 short stories, autobiographical sketches and essays in Quite Early One Morning, a volume planned by Thomas shortly before his death, were read by him on such occasions. They are alive with his verbal magic, his intense perception of life, his gargantuan humor and with the very ring of his voice. Included in this collection of prose pieces are such favorites as the hilarious “A Visit to America,” the account of a small boy’s marvelous day’s outing––”A Story,” and the memorable “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” which has been called ’the twentieth century Christmas Carol.’ Other pieces show Thomas’s power as a sensitive critic of poetry and as an exponent of his own intent as a poet.

Author: Dylan Thomas
Date: 1954
Genre: Radio Drama, Play
Country: UK

An omniscient narrator invites the audience to listen to the dreams and innermost thoughts of the inhabitants of the fictional small Welsh fishing town, Llareggub, (buggerall spelt backwards).

Author: John Berryman
Date: 1965
Genre: Poetry
Country: USA

John Berryman was hardly unknown when he published 77 Dream Songs, but the volume was, nevertheless, a shock and a revelation. A “spooky” collection in the words of Robert Lowell-“a maddening work of genius.”

As Henri Cole notes in his elegant, perceptive introduction, Berryman had discovered “a looser style that mixed high and low dictions with a strange syntax.” Berryman had also discovered his most enduring alter ego, a paranoid, passionate, depressed, drunk, irrepressible antihero named Henry or, sometimes, Mr. Bones: “We touch at certain points,” Berryman claimed, of Henry, “But I am an actual human being.”

Author: Various
Date: 1952
Genre: Various
Country: UK

This comprehensive anthology collects the best of Irish prose from the past millennium, from classic folk tales to the best of modern fiction. Highlights include works by James Joyce, Bram Stoker, and Maeve Binchy, as well as lesser-known gems that showcase the breadth and depth of Ireland’s literary heritage.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1996
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA

Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales–eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time–display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur’s samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master’s genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.

Author: Various
Date: 1992
Genre: Poetry
Country: USA

A monument to the literary genius of women throughout the ages, A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now is an invaluable collection. Here in one volume are the works of three hundred poets from six different continents and four millennia.

Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Date: 1981
Genre: Poetry
Country: USA

Showcases the poet’s commitment to political and social activism through his work. Ferlinghetti, who embodies the spirit of the Beat generation, emphasizes the importance of artistic integrity and the avoidance of complicity with government influences. The collection highlights his vision of a collective consciousness aimed at challenging societal norms and advocating for change through accessible, public poetry.

Author: Oliver Sacks
Date: 2012
Genre: Neurology, Psychology
Country: USA

Sacks recounts stories of hallucinations and other mind-altering episodes of both his patients and himself and uses them in an attempt to elucidate certain features and structures of the brain including his own migraine headaches.

Author: Laila Lalami
Date: 2025
Genre: Literary Science Fiction
Country: USA

Sara Hussein is a Moroccan American woman who, upon her return from a trip to the United Kingdom, is detained by a government agency tasked with determining citizens’ propensity to committing crimes. She is detained in what starts as a temporary arrangement but, through bureaucratic hiccups and intentional mismanagement, begins to seem more and more permanent.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1987
Genre: 
Country: UK

The novel depicts a young French soldier in the Napoleonic army during 1805 as he takes charge of Napoleon’s personal larder.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1994
Genre: 
Country: UK

‘There is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies’. Set in a London of the near future, its three principal characters, Handel, Picasso and Sappho, separately flee the city and find themselves on the same train, drawn to one another through the curious agency of a book. Stories within stories take us through the unlikely love affairs of one Doll Sneerpiece, an 18th century bawd, and into the world of painful beauty where language has the power to heal. Art & Lies is a question and a quest: How shall I live?

Author: Doris Lessing
Date: 1988
Genre: Short Novel
Country: UK

It describes the changes in the happy life of a married couple, Harriet and David Lovatt, as a consequence of the birth of Ben, their fifth child.

Author: Lorrie Moore
Date: 1998
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA

A collection of short stories by American writer Lorrie Moore. The stories in this collection originally appeared in The New Yorker, Elle, The New York Times, and The Paris Review.

Author: Malcolm X with Alex Haley
Date: 1965
Genre: Autobiography
Country: USA

An autobiography written by Muslim American minister and activist Malcolm X in collaboration with American journalist Alex Haley. It was released posthumously on October 29, 1965, nine months after his assassination. Haley coauthored the book based on a series of in-depth interviews he conducted between 1963 and 1965. The Autobiography is a religious conversion narrative which outlines Malcolm X’s philosophy of Black pride, Black nationalism, and pan-Africanism. After Malcolm X was killed, Haley wrote the book’s epilogue,[a] which describes their collaborative process and the events at the end of Malcolm’s life.

Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Date: 1957
Genre: Philosophical Essay
Country: France

In this provocative philosophical analysis, Jean-Paul Sartre refutes the idea that existentialism drains meaning from human life, by claiming that the philosophy instead gives man total freedom to achieve his own significance

Author: Norman Rush
Date: 1991
Genre: 
Country: USA

It is a first-person narrative by an unnamed American anthropology graduate student in Botswana around 1980. It focuses on her relationship with Nelson Denoon, a controversial American social scientist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari Desert.

Author: James Baldwin
Date: 1962
Genre: 
Country: USA

The novel is primarily set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France in the late 1950s. It portrayed many themes that were taboo at the time of its release, including homosexuality, bisexuality, interracial couples, and extramarital affairs.

Author: Graham Swift
Date: 1983
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK

The plot of the novel revolves around loosely interwoven themes and narrative, including the attraction of the narrator’s brother to his girlfriend/wife, a resulting murder, a girl having an abortion that leaves her sterile, and her later struggle with depression. As an adult woman, she kidnaps a baby.

Author: Saul Bellow
Date: 1953
Genre: Picaresque Novel, Bildungsroman
Country: USA

An impulsively active, irresistibly charming and resolutely free-spirited man, Augie March leaves his family of poor Jewish immigrants behind and sets off in search of reality, fulfillment, and most importantly, love. During his exultant quest, he latches on to a series of dubious schemes – from stealing books and smuggling immigrants to training a temperamental eagle to hunt lizards – and strong-minded women – from the fiery, eagle-owning Thea Fenchel, to the sneaky and alluring Stella. As Augie travels from the depths of poverty to the peaks of worldly success, he stands as an irresistible, poignant incarnation of the American idea of freedom.

Author: Will Self
Date: 1991
Genre: Short Stories
Country: UK

It was the first published collection of the author’s short work and includes themes and characters (such as Zack Busner) that are common throughout Self’s shorter and longer fiction.

Author: Jack Kerouac
Date: 1965
Genre: Semi-Autobiographical Novel
Country: USA

The events described in the novel take place from 1956-1957. Much of the psychological struggle which the novel’s protagonist, Jack Duluoz, undergoes in the novel reflects Kerouac’s own increasing disenchantment with the Buddhist philosophy. Throughout the novel, Kerouac discusses his disenchantment with fame, and complicated feelings towards the Beat Generation. He also discusses his relationship with his mother and his friends (and prominent Beat figures) such as Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Lucienn Carr and William S. Burroughs. The novel is also notable for being a relatively positive portrayal of homosexuality and homosexual characters, despite its use of words that were at the time considered homophobic slurs.

Author: Umberto Eco
Date: 1988
Genre: Postmodern, Encyclopedic Novel
Country: Italy

Bored with their work, three Milanese book editors cook up an elaborate hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their own creation, they produce a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled—a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum.

But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real. When occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth. Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Umberto Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.

Author: John Knowles
Date: 1959
Genre: Realism
Country: USA

Set against the backdrop of World War II, A Separate Peace explores morality, patriotism, and loss of innocence through its narrator, Gene Forrester, in his relationship with classmate and friend Phineas.

Author: Chang-Rae Lee
Date: 1999
Genre: Autobiography
Country: USA

It takes the form of a narrative of an elderly medical-supply salesman named Doc Hata, who deals with everyday life in a small town in the United States called Bedley Run, and who remembers treating Korean comfort women for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. He once owned a medical and surgical supply store and he has an adopted daughter named Sunny. All the problems which Doc Hata has to deal with stem from his experiences serving the Japanese Imperial Army in the World War II.

Author: Philip Roth
Date: 1995
Genre: Autobiographical Fiction, Spy
Country: USA

Mickey Sabbath (modeled after American Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj) is an unproductive, out-of-work, former puppeteer with a strong affinity for prostitutes, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Sabbath takes great pleasure in his status as the prototypical “dirty old man.” He takes an equal pleasure in manipulating the people around him, primarily women—in a sense, they play the same role as his puppets. The loss of a decades-long wingman—the equally depraved Drenka—precipitates a crisis in a life he has long considered an utter failure. Sabbath wonders whether he should simply take his own life, thereby heeding the advice of the ghost of his departed mother, a frequent visitor who urges suicide as the fitting end for his failed life.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1994
Genre:
Country: UK

The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman.

Author: Julian Barnes
Date: 1984
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK

The novel follows Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widowed, retired English doctor, visiting France. While visiting sites related to Flaubert, Geoffrey discovers two museums claiming to display the stuffed parrot which sat atop Flaubert’s writing desk for a brief period while he wrote “Un Cœur Simple“. While trying to identify which is authentic, Braithwaite learns that Flaubert’s parrot could be any one of fifty (“Une cinquantaine de perroquets!”, p. 187) that had been held in the collection of the municipal museum.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1989
Genre: Postmodern, Historical Fiction, Fantasy Fiction
Country: UK

Set in 17th century London, Sexing the Cherry is about the journeys of a mother, known as The Dog Woman, and her protégé, Jordan. They journey in a space-time flux: across the seas to find exotic fruits such as bananas and pineapples; and across time, with glimpses of “the present” and references to Charles I of England and Oliver Cromwell. The mother’s physical appearance is somewhat “grotesque”. She is a giant, wrapped in a skirt big enough to serve as a ship’s sail and strong enough to fling an elephant. She is also hideous, with smallpox scars in which fleas live, a flat nose and foul teeth. Her son, however, is proud of her, as no other mother can hold a good dozen oranges in her mouth all at once. Ultimately, their journey is a journey in search of The Self.

Author: Ian McEwan
Date: 1987
Genre:
Country: UK

The story concerns Stephen, an author of children’s books, and his wife, two years after the kidnapping of their three-year-old daughter Kate.

Author: Robert Bolt
Date: 1960
Genre: Play
Country: UK

The plot is based on the historical events leading up to the execution of Thomas More, the 16th-century Lord Chancellor of England, who refused to endorse Henry VIII’s wish to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon, who did not bear him a surviving son, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Author: Ian McEwan
Date: 1990
Genre:
Country: UK

The novel takes place in 1955–56 Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War and centres on the joint CIA/MI6 Operation Gold, to build a tunnel from the American sector of Berlin into the Russian sector to tap phone lines of the Soviet High Command. Leonard Marnham is a 25-year-old Englishman who sets up and repairs the tape recorders used in the tunnel. He falls in love with Maria Eckdorf, a 30-year-old divorced German. The story revolves around their relationship and Leonard’s role in the operation.

Author: Oliver Sacks
Date: 2011
Genre: Neurological Case Studies
Country: USA

The book contains case studies of people whose ability to navigate the world visually and communicate with others have been compromised, including the author’s own experience with cancer of the eye and his lifelong inability to recognize faces.

Author: Jonathan Lethem
Date: 1999
Genre: Detective Novel
Country: USA

Told in first person, the story follows Lionel Essrog, a private investigator who has Tourette’s, a disorder marked by involuntary tics. Essrog works for Frank Minna, a small-time owner of a “seedy and makeshift” detective agency disguised as a transportation company. Together, Essrog and three other characters who are all orphans from Brooklyn—Tony, Danny, and Gilbert—call themselves “the Minna Men”.

Author: Jeanette Winterson
Date: 1995
Genre: Essays
Country: UK

In these ten intertwined essays, Winterson proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic as a novelist. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us.

Author: Milan Kundera
Date: 2000
Genre:
Country: Czech Republic

Czech expatriate Irena has been living in France since fleeing Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. In 1989, when the Velvet Revolution overthrows the governing Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Irena decides to return to her home after twenty years of living as an exiled immigrant. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague.

Author: Milan Kundera
Date: 1988
Genre:
Country: Czech Republic

The story springs from a casual gesture of a woman, seemingly to her swimming instructor.

Author: Arthur Miller
Date: 1955
Genre: Play
Country: USA

The play is set in 1950s America, in an Italian-American neighborhood near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It employs a chorus and narrator in the character of Alfieri. Eddie, the tragic protagonist, has an improper love for, and almost an obsession with, Catherine, his wife Beatrice’s orphaned niece, so he does not approve of her courtship of Beatrice’s cousin Rodolpho.

Author: Hermann Hesse
Date: 1978
Genre: Essays
Country: German

One of the most astonishing aspects of Hesse’s genius is the clear-sightedness of his political views and hid passionate espousal of pacifism from World War I to the end of his life. This superb collection of essays is charged with emotion. World War II was a shock to Hesse, and his writings from that time are filled with personal anguish and his antagonism to racism, nationalism and war.

Author: Philip Roth
Date: 1993
Genre: Autobiographical Fiction, Spy
Country: USA

The novel follows narrator “Philip Roth” on a journey to Israel, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the “Operation Shylock” of the title.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1987
Genre: African American
Country: USA

Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit.

Author: Paul Auster
Date: 1987
Genre: Postmodern, Mystery
Country: USA

The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by American writer Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume. The Trilogy is a postmodern interpretation of detective and mystery fiction, exploring various philosophical themes.

Author: Eugène Ionesco
Date: 1965
Genre: Absurdist, Play
Country: France

A Stroll in the Air concerns Monsieur Berenger who is the hero of many of Ionesco’s plays, including Rhinoceros. What happens to Berenger, his wife and daughter — a French family living for unstated reasons in England — is the source and substance of the play, for Berenger discovers one day he has the miraculous gift of freeing himself from the law of gravity. How the English react to this oddity also reveals Ionesco’s feelings about the insular people with whom he has been fascinated since his earliest plays.

Author: Kenzaburō Ōe
Date: 1964
Genre: Semi-autobiographical
Country: Japan

It tells the story of a young father who must come to terms with the fact that his newborn son is severely mentally disabled.

Author: Michael Chabon
Date: 1988
Genre: Coming of Age
Country: USA

A college graduate’s defining summer crossing his gangster dad and exploring love, sexuality, and the enigmas surrounding his life and his city.

Author: Michael Chabon
Date: 2000
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: USA

A historical fiction novel, it follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Josef “Joe” Kavalier, a Czech artist and magician who escapes Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sammy Clay, a Brooklyn-born writer. Together, they create The Escapist, a fictional superhero inspired by Joe’s desire to fight fascism and his struggle to rescue his family from Europe. In the story, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry during its Golden Age.

Author: Arthur Miller
Date: 1964
Genre: Play
Country: USA

A thinly veiled personal critique centered on Miller’s recent divorce from Marilyn Monroe: the plot takes place inside the mind of Quentin, a New York City Jewish intellectual who decides to reexamine his life, in order to determine whether or not he should marry his most recent love, Holga.

Author: Nicholson Baker
Date: 1988
Genre: 
Country: USA

It narrates what goes through a man’s mind during a modern lunch break.

Author: Robertson Davies
Date: 1970-1975
Genre: Trilogy of Novels
Country: Canada

The trilogy consists of Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975). The series revolves around a precipitating event: a young boy throws a snowball at another, hitting a pregnant woman instead, who goes into premature labor. It explores the longterm effects of these events on numerous characters.

Author: Margaret Atwood
Date: 1993
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA

Set in present-day Toronto, Ontario, the novel is about three women and their history with old friend and nemesis, Zenia. Roz, Charis, and Tony meet once a month in a restaurant to share a meal years after Zenia betrayed them and interfered with their romantic relationships. During one outing they spot Zenia, who they thought to be long-dead. The plot then travels back in time to explain how Zenia stole, one by one, their respective partners.

Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1960
Genre: Short Stories
Country: USA

It includes all three of O’Connor’s O. Henry Award-winning stories: “Greenleaf” (1957), “Everything That Rises Must Converge” (1963), and “Revelation” (1965). In addition, it contains two stories that were published for the first time via the collection: “Parker’s Back” and “Judgement Day”.

Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1960
Genre: Southern Gothic
Country: USA

The novel tells the story of Francis Marion Tarwater, a fourteen-year-old boy who is trying to escape the destiny his uncle has prescribed for him: the life of a prophet. Like most of O’Connor’s stories, the novel is filled with Catholic themes and dark images, making it a classic example of Southern Gothic literature.

Author: Flannery O’Connor
Date: 1952
Genre: Southern Gothic
Country: USA

The novel concerns a returning World War II veteran who, haunted by a life-long crisis of faith, resolves to form an anti-religious ministry in an eccentric, fictionalized city in the Southern United States after finding his family homestead abandoned without a trace.

Author: Salmon Rushdie
Date: 2001
Genre: 
Country: UK

Rushdie depicts contemporary New York City as the epicenter of globalization and all of its tragic flaws.

Author: Hernán Díaz
Date: 2022
Genre: Metafiction
Country: USA

Set predominantly in New York City and focusing on the world of finance, the novel is a metafictional, fragmentary look at a secretive financier and his wife.

The book is composed of four fictional texts: a novel (Bonds), an incomplete autobiography (My Life), a completed memoir (A Memoir, Remembered), and a diary (Futures). While each book focuses on many of the same characters, the information included in each is often mutually exclusive, with it being left up to the reader to determine the truth.

Author: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Date: 1957
Genre: Nouveau Roman, Avant-Garde
Country: France

This novel is an avant-garde narrative that explores the concept of jealousy through a highly detailed and descriptive narrative. The story unfolds in a tropical banana plantation and is told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator who may or may not be present in the scenes described. The narrative is characterized by repetition and minute observation of details, creating a sense of obsessive jealousy. The story is ambiguous and leaves the reader questioning the reality of the events and the existence of the narrator.

Author: John Fowles
Date: 1965
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK

The novel is a psychological drama that follows a young Englishman, Nicholas Urfe, who takes a teaching post on a remote Greek island to escape his dull life and a failed relationship. There, he meets a wealthy, mysterious man who introduces him to psychological games that blend myth, reality, and illusion. As Nicholas falls deeper into these manipulative scenarios, he begins to question his own sanity and reality. The story is filled with existential themes, exploring the nature of personal freedom, love, and the blurred line between reality and fantasy.

Author: Max Frisch
Date: 1954
Genre: Postmodern
Country: Switzerland

The book is a profound exploration of identity and the human condition, revolving around a man who is arrested upon his return to his home country, Switzerland, after spending time in America. Although he insists he is not the man, Stiller, that everyone believes him to be, his protests are ignored. The story unfolds as he writes in his prison cell, reflecting on his past life and relationships, and grappling with the question of who he truly is. It’s a thought-provoking narrative that challenges conventional notions of selfhood and personal identity.

Author: Philip Roth
Date: 2000
Genre: 
Country: USA

The Human Stain is a novel that explores the life of Coleman Silk, a classics professor in a small New England town who is forced to retire after accusations of racism. The story delves into Silk’s personal history, revealing that he is a light-skinned African American who has been passing as a Jewish man for most of his adult life. His affair with a much younger, illiterate janitor further scandalizes the community. The novel examines themes of identity, race, and the destructive power of public shaming.

Author: Georges Perec
Date: 1978
Genre: Postmodern
Country: France

The novel explores the lives of the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block through a complex, multi-layered narrative. It delves into the interconnected stories of the building’s residents, revealing their secrets, desires, and disappointments. The narrative is structured like a puzzle, with the author employing a variety of literary styles and devices, making it a complex and intriguing exploration of human life.

Author: Roberto Bolaño
Date: 2004
Genre: Postmodern, Surrealism, Metafiction
Country: Spain

The novel is a sprawling, ambitious work that spans continents and time periods, centering around an elusive, reclusive German author. It intertwines five different narratives: a group of European academics searching for the author, a professor in Mexico dealing with his own personal crises, a New York reporter sent to cover a boxing match in Mexico, an African-American journalist in Detroit, and the horrifying and unsolved murders of hundreds of women in a Mexican border town. The narratives are linked by themes of violence, mystery, and the search for meaning in a chaotic world.

Author: Will Self
Date: 2026
Genre: Satire
Country: UK

Self’s middle-English characters appear trapped in a timeless go-round of polite chitchat in dinner parties that refract like a hall of mirrors, until one day someone says something to the effect of, “This way to the gas chamber, please, ladies and gentlemen.”

Author: Douglas Stuart
Date: 2020
Genre: Bildungsroman, LGBTQ+
Country: USA

It tells the story of the youngest of three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother Agnes in 1980s post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.

Author: Anthony Doerr
Date: 2021
Genre: Historical Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy
Country: USA

The story of five characters spanning eight centuries, told in anachronic order. Their stories are bound by an Ancient Greek codex entitled Cloud Cuckoo Land that each of the five characters discover and find solace in. It is a fictional book written by real Greek novelist Antonius Diogenes in the second century, and tells the story of Aethon, a shepherd on a quest to find the fabled paradise in the sky. In his travels, he is transformed into a donkey, a sea bass, and finally a crow, which allows him to fly to the gates of the city in the clouds.

Author: Barbara Kingsolver
Date: 2022
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family Saga, Mystery
Country: USA

Kingsolver was inspired by the Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield. While Kingsolver’s novel is similarly about a boy who experiences poverty, Demon Copperhead is set in Appalachia and explores contemporary issues. The book touches on themes of the social and economic stratification in Appalachia, child poverty in rural America, and drug addiction with a focus on the opioid crisis.

Author: Brit Bennett
Date: 2020
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family Saga, Mystery
Country: USA

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

Author: Haruki Murakami
Date: 2013
Genre: Bildungsroman
Country: Japan

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present.

Author: Paul Kalanithi
Date: 2016
Genre: Autobiography[
Country: USA

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

Author: Elena Ferrante
Date: 2011
Genre: Bildungsroman[
Country: Italy

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women.

Author: Colson Whitehead
Date: 2016
Genre: African American, Alternate History
Country: USA

The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora, a slave in the Antebellum South during the 19th century, who makes a bid for freedom from her Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad, which the novel depicts as an actual rail transport system with safe houses and secret routes.

Author: Adam Johnson
Date: 2012
Genre:
Country: USA

It deals with intertwined propaganda, identity, and state power themes in North Korea.

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Date: 2013
Genre:
Country: Nigeria

Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.

Author: Haruki Murakami
Date: 2010
Genre: Alternate History
Country: Japan

It covers a fictionalized year of 1984 in parallel with a “real” one. The novel is a story of how a woman named Aomame begins to notice strange changes occurring in the world. She is quickly caught up in a plot involving Sakigake, a religious cult, and her childhood love, Tengo, and embarks on a journey to discover what is “real”.

Author: Donna Tartt
Date: 2013
Genre:
Country: USA

The Goldfinch follows 13-year-old Theodore Decker, and the dramatic changes his life undergoes after he survives a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills his mother and results in him coming into possession of Carel Fabritius’s painting The Goldfinch.

Author: Anthony Doerr
Date: 2014
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: USA

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Date: 2006
Genre: Bildungsroman
Country: UK

Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, the story follows Ugwu, a teenage houseboy who has moved from his village to work in a university town; his master Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with revolutionary views; and Olanna, with whom Odenigbo is in love, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Nigerian man. When the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) breaks out, their lives are thrown into anarchy.

Author: Hilary Mantel
Date: 2009
Genre: Historical Novel
Country: UK

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?

Author: Azar Nafisi
Date: 2003
Genre: Memoir
Country: USA

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Author: Geraldine Brooks
Date: 2001
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: UK

The novel is written in the point of view of a housemaid named Anna Frith, on what she lives through when the plague hits her village. It is based on the history of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam that, when beset by the plague in 1666, quarantines itself in order to prevent the disease from spreading further. The plague that hit Eyam and other parts of Britain in 1665 and ’66 was one of many recurrences that had taken place since the Black Death of the 14th century.

Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Date: 2000
Genre: Horror, Metafiction, Postmodern
Country: USA

The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled The Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant’s footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals The Navidson Record‘s supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house.

Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Date: 2003
Genre: Magical Realism
Country: USA

In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.

The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

Author: Haruki Murakami
Date: 2002
Genre: Magical Realism
Country: USA

The book tells the stories of the young Kafka Tamura, a bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse, and Satoru Nakata, an old, mentally disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats. The book incorporates themes of music as a communicative conduit, metaphysics, dreams, fate, and the subconscious.

Author: Susanna Clarke
Date: 2004
Genre: Alternative History
Country: UK

It is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of “Englishness” and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel.

Author: David Mitchell
Date: 2004
Genre: Historical Fiction, Metafiction, Science Fiction
Country: UK

The book combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction, with interconnected nested stories in different writing styles that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawaii in a distant post-apocalyptic future. Its title references a piece of music by Toshi Ichiyanagi.

The book consists of six nested stories; each is read or observed by the protagonist of the next, progressing in time through the central sixth story. The first five stories are each interrupted at a pivotal moment. After the sixth story, the others are resolved in reverse chronological order.

Author: Jeannette Walls
Date: 2005
Genre: Memoir
Country: USA

Walls recounts her dysfunctional and nomadic yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father’s attempts toward redemption. Despite her family’s flaws, their love for each other and her unique perspective on life allowed her to create a successful life of her own, culminating in a career in journalism in New York City. The book’s title refers to her father’s ultimate unfulfilled promise, to build his dream home for the family: a glass castle.

Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Date: 2002
Genre: Family Saga, Bildungsroman
Country: USA

The astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them–along with Callie’s failure to develop–leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades–and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides’s long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

Author: José Saramago
Date: 1991
Genre: Historical Novel
Country: Portugal

This is a skeptic’s journey into the meaning of God and of human existence. At once an ironic rendering of the life of Christ and a beautiful novel, Saramago’s tale has sparked intense discussion about the meaning of Christianity and the Church as an institution.

Author: Roberto Bolaño
Date: 1998
Genre: Postmodern
Country: USA

The novel tells the story of the search for a 1920s Mexican poet, Cesárea Tinajero, by two 1970s poets, the Chilean Arturo Belano (alter ego of Bolaño) and the Mexican Ulises Lima.

Author: Don DeLillo
Date: 1997
Genre: Postmodern
Country: USA

While Eisenstein documented the forces of totalitarianism and Stalinism upon the faces of the Russian peoples, DeLillo offers a stunning, at times overwhelming, document of the twin forces of the Cold War and American culture, compelling that “swerve from evenness” in which he finds events and people both wondrous and horrifying.

Author: Jung Chang
Date: 1991
Genre: Biography
Country: UK

A family history that spans a century, recounting the lives of three female generations in China, by Chinese writer Jung Chang. First published in 1991, Wild Swans contains the biographies of her mother and her grandmother, then finally her own autobiography. Her grandmother had bound feet and was married off at a young age as the concubine of a high-status warlord. Chang’s mother rose in status as a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Chang took part in the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Red Guards, but eventually her father was tortured and she was sent to the countryside for thought reform. Later, she earned a scholarship to study in England, where she still lives.

Author: Philip Roth
Date: 1997
Genre:
Country: USA

Roth’s protagonist is Seymour ‘Swede’ Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father’s Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.

For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth’s masterpiece.

Author: Margaret Atwood
Date: 1996
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: Canada

The story fictionalizes the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Canada West. Two servants of the Kinnear household, Grace Marks and James McDermott, were convicted of the crime. McDermott was hanged and Marks was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Although the novel is based on factual events, Atwood constructs a narrative with a fictional doctor, Simon Jordan, who researches the case.

Author: A. S. Byatt
Date: 1990
Genre: 
Country: UK

The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction. The story follows two modern-day academics as they research the paper trail around the previously unknown love life between famous fictional poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte.

Author: Jostein Gaarder
Date: 1991
Genre: Philosophical Novel
Country: Norway

It follows Sophie Amundsen, a Norwegian teenager, who is introduced to the history of philosophy as she is asked “Who are you?” “Where does this world come from?” in a letter from an unknown philosopher. The nonfictional content of the book roughly aligns with Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy.

Author: Arthur Golden
Date: 1997
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: USA

The novel, told in first person perspective, tells the story of Nitta Sayuri and the many trials she faces on the path to becoming and working as a geisha in Kyoto, Japan, before, during and after World War II.

Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Date: 1982
Genre: 
Country: UK

The story of Etsuko, a middle-aged Japanese woman living alone in England, and opens with discussion between Etsuko and her younger daughter, Niki, about the recent suicide of Etsuko’s older daughter, Keiko.

Author: Salman Rushdie
Date: 1988
Genre: Magical Realism
Country: UK

Just before dawn one winter’s morning, a hijacked jetliner explodes above the English Channel. Through the falling debris, two figures, Gibreel Farishta, the biggest star in India, and Saladin Chamcha, an expatriate returning from his first visit to Bombay in fifteen years, plummet from the sky, washing up on the snow-covered sands of an English beach, and proceed through a series of metamorphoses, dreams, and revelations.

Author: William Gaddis
Date: 1975
Genre: 
Country: USA

J R Vansant is an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called “the American dream turned inside out”. One critic called it “the greatest satirical novel in American literature.”

Author: Milan Kundera
Date: 1979
Genre: 
Country: France

It is composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics, and life in general. The stories also contain elements found in the genre of magic realism.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1973
Genre: African American
Country: USA

The novel tells the story of two girls, Sula and Nel, and their friendship and coming of age in a black community in Ohio.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1970
Genre: African American
Country: USA

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom. Pecola’s life does change—in painful, devastating ways.

Author: Toni Morrison
Date: 1977
Genre: African American
Country: USA

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Author: Italo Calvino
Date: 1979
Genre: Postmodern
Country: Italy

The postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If on a winter’s night a traveler. Each chapter is divided into two sections. The first section of each chapter is in second person, and describes the process the reader goes through to attempt to read the next chapter of the book they are reading. The second half is the first part of a new book that the reader (“you”) finds. The second half is always about something different from the previous ones.

Author: Heinrich Böll
Date: 1963
Genre: 
Country: Germany

A post-WWII German novel following Hans Schnier, a disillusioned, alcohol-dependent professional clown, who falls into despair and poverty after his lover, Marie, leaves him for a strict Catholic official. The book is a biting critique of German society’s hypocrisy, religious rigidity, and failure to confront its Nazi past.

Author: Flann O’Brien
Date: 1967
Genre: Comedy, Absurdist, Philosophical Novel
Country: Ireland

A surreal, dark comic novel following an unnamed narrator who murders a man for money to fund his study of a bizarre philosopher, de Selby. After the crime, he enters a nightmarish, dreamlike world where he interacts with eccentric policemen, encounters a “bicycle-human” theory, and discovers he is already dead.

Author: Thomas Pynchon
Date: 1963
Genre: Postmodern, Metafiction, Satire
Country: USA

It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveler named Herbert Stencil to identify and locate the mysterious entity he knows only as “V.”

Author: Robert A. Heinlein
Date: 1961
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: USA

It tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on the planet Mars and raised by Martians, and explores his interaction with and eventual transformation of Terran culture.

Author: Maya Angelou
Date: 1969
Genre: Autobiography
Country: USA

A 1969 autobiography describing the young and early years of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome racism and trauma.

Author: Sylvia Plath
Date: 1963
Genre: Roman à clef
Country: USA

It follows protagonist Esther Greenwood as she navigates societal pressures and a profound identity crisis during a summer internship in 1950s New York, leading to a breakdown and institutionalization. The book is a classic of American literature, known for its raw, darkly humorous, and intense exploration of depression, female ambition, and the suffocating expectations placed on women.

Author: Juan Rulfo
Date: 1955
Genre:
Country: Mexico

As one enters Juan Rulfo’s legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo – lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo’s extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.

Author: Jack Kerouac
Date: 1958
Genre:
Country: USA

Two ebullient young men search for Truth the Zen way: from marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, and “yabyum” in San Francisco’s Bohemia, to solitude in the high Sierras and a vigil atop Desolation Peak in Washington State. Published just a year after On the Road put the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums is sparked by Kerouac’s expansiveness, humor, and a contagious zest for life.

Author: Françoise Sagan
Date: 1954
Genre:
Country: France

The story follows Cécile’s carefree summer with her widowed, womanizing father, which is upended by the arrival of Anne, a sophisticated woman who threatens to disrupt their hedonistic lifestyle, prompting Cécile to orchestrate a plan with tragic results. The novel is known for its exploration of youthful selfishness, guilt, and the complexities of family dynamics, set against a backdrop of sun-drenched luxury.

Author: Arthur C. Clarke
Date: 1953
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: UK

The story follows a peaceful alien invasion of Earth by mysterious Overlords, whose arrival begins decades of apparent utopia under indirect alien rule, at the cost of human identity and culture.

Author: Hannah Arendt
Date: 1951
Genre: Essays
Country: USA

Hannah Arendt’s first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century.

Author: James Baldwin
Date: 1955
Genre: Essays
Country: USA

It was his debut nonfiction book, and it explores deep and personal themes, especially focusing on race, identity, and the Black experience in both America and Europe.

Author: Anaïs Nin
Date: 1954
Genre: Short Stories, Erotica
Country: USA

In Delta of Venus Anaïs Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own ‘language of the senses’, she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning.

Author: Kingsley Amis
Date: 1954
Genre: Bildungsroman
Country: USA

Jim Dixon has accidentally fallen into a job at one of Britain’s new red brick universities. A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons. As long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch’s, deliver a lecture on ‘Merrie England’ and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch’s awful son Bertrand.

Author: James Baldwin
Date: 1956
Genre:
Country: USA

Considered an ‘audacious’ second novel, Giovanni’s Room is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Author: James Baldwin
Date: 1953
Genre: Semi-Autobiography
Country: USA

“Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire–a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!” First published in 1953, Baldwin’s first novel is a short but intense, semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression.

Author: Elie Wiesel
Date: 1956
Genre: Memoir
Country: Argentina

Born into a Jewish ghetto in Hungary, as a child, Elie Wiesel was sent to the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. This is his account of that atrocity: the ever-increasing horrors he endured, the loss of his family and his struggle to survive in a world that stripped him of humanity, dignity and faith. Describing in simple terms the tragic murder of a people from a survivor’s perspective, Night is among the most personal, intimate and poignant of all accounts of the Holocaust. A compelling consideration of the darkest side of human nature and the enduring power of hope, it remains one of the most important works of the twentieth century.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Date: 1985
Genre: Romance Novel
Country: Colombia

Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally – after fifty-one years, nine months and four days – Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?

Author: Shirley Jackson
Date: 1962
Genre: Psychological Horror
Country: USA

Living in the Blackwood family home with only her sister Constance and her Uncle Julian for company, Merricat just wants to preserve their delicate way of life. But ever since Constance was acquitted of murdering the rest of the family, the world isn’t leaving the Blackwoods alone. And when Cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect the remaining family.

Author: William S. Burroughs
Date: 1959
Genre: Science Fiction, Surrealism
Country: France

A cultural landmark and the most shocking novel in the English language, Naked Lunch is an exhilarating ride into the darkest recesses of the human psyche. An unnerving tale of an addict unmoored in New York, Tangier, and ultimately a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone, Naked Lunch‘s formal innovation, formerly taboo subject matter, and tour de force execution has exerted its influence authors like Thomas Pynchon and J. G. Ballard; on the relationship of art and obscenity; and on the shape of music, film, and media in general.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1969
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: USA

Written in mischievous and magically flowing prose, Ada or Ardor is a romance that follows Ada from her first childhood meeting with Van Veen on his uncle’s country estate, in a ‘dream-bright’ America, through eighty years of rapture, as they cross continents, are continually parted and reunited, come to learn the strange truth about their singular relationship and, decades later, put their extraordinary experiences into words.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1951
Genre: Memoir, Essays
Country: USA

‘Speak, memory’, said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections – of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itself a work of art.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1957
Genre:
Country: USA

Professor Timofey Pnin, previously of Tsarist Russia, is now precariously positioned at the heart of campus America. Battling with American life and language, Pnin must face great hazards in this new world: the ruination of his beautiful lumber-room-as-office; the removal of his teeth and the fitting of new ones; the search for a suitable boarding-house; and the trials of taking the wrong train.

Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Date: 1974
Genre: Fictional Autobiography
Country: USA

‘Look at the harlequins … Play! Invent the world! Invent reality’. This is the childhood advice given by an aunt to Russian born writer Vadim Vadimovich, who emigrates to England, then Paris, then Germany and then the US, and, now dying, reconstructs his past. He remembers Iris his first wife, Annette his long-necked typist and Bel his daughter, as well as his own bizarre ‘numerical nimbus syndrome’.

Author: Kōbō Abe
Date: 1984
Genre: Science Fiction
Country: Japan

A recluse known as ‘Mole’ retreats to a vast underground bunker, only to find that strange guests, booby traps and a giant toilet may prove even greater obstacles than nuclear disaster. A science-fiction classic from acclaimed Japanese novelist Kobo Abe, The Ark Sakura‘s Kafkaesque embrace of nuclear disaster and ecological catastrophe is at turns both hilarious and desperate.

Author: William Gaddis
Date: 1955
Genre: Postmodern
Country: UK

The Recognitions follows Wyatt Gwyon, a talented painter who turns to forging 15th-century Flemish masters in New York City after failing to find artistic authenticity. Amid a satirical backdrop of a shallow, modern art world, Wyatt deals with a shady dealer (Recktall Brown), moral decay, and his own disillusionment before fleeing to Spain to seek true artistic and personal integrity.

Author: J. G. Ballard
Date: 1970
Genre: Science Fiction, Experimental
Country: UK

The Atrocity Exhibition is an experimental novel of linked stories or “condensed novels” by British writer J. G. Ballard.

Author: Thomas Pynchon
Date: 1973
Genre: Postmodern, Satire, Science Fiction, Historical Fiction
Country: USA

The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät (‘black device’), which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number “00000”.

Author: David Markson
Date: 1988
Genre: Postmodern, Experimental, Philosophical
Country: USA

A highly stylized, experimental novel in the tradition of Samuel Beckett. The novel is mainly a series of statements made in the first person; the protagonist is a woman named Kate who believes herself to be the last human on earth. Though her statements shift quickly from topic to topic, the topics often recur, and often refer to Western cultural icons, ranging from Zeno to Beethoven to Willem de Kooning. Readers familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus will recognize stylistic similarities to that work.

Author: John Steinbeck
Date: 1961
Genre:
Country: USA

Ethan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards. Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty, and today ranks alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition.

Author: Shirley Jackson
Date: 1959
Genre: Gothic, Psychological Horror
Country: USA

First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Date: 2022
Genre:
Country: USA

The novel follows the relationship between two friends who begin a successful video game company together.

Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Date: 2015
Genre: Autobiography
Country: USA

It was written by Coates as a letter to his then-teenage son about his perception of what the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States are. Coates recapitulates American history and explains to his son “racist violence that has been woven into American culture.” Coates draws from an abridged, autobiographical account of his youth in Baltimore, detailing his beliefs about the ways in which, to him, institutions like schools, the local police, and even “the streets” discipline, endanger, and threaten to “disembody” black men and women.

Author: Zadie Smith
Date: 2000
Genre: Postcolonial
Country: UK

Focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and their families in London. The novel centres on Britain’s relationship with immigrants from the British Commonwealth.

Author: Ian McEwan
Date: 2001
Genre: Metafiction
Country: UK

Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl’s half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.

Author: W.G. Sebald
Date: 2001
Genre: Historical Novel
Country: Germany

The discursive, dreamlike recollections of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who was once a small refugee of the kindertransport in wartime Prague, raised by strangers in Wales. Like the namesake Paris train station of its protagonist, the book is a marvel of elegant construction, haunted by memory and motion.

Author: Arundhati Roy
Date: 2025
Genre: Memoir
Country: India

A raw and deeply moving memoir from the legendary author of The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness that traces the complex relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, a fierce and formidable force who shaped Arundhati’s life both as a woman and a writer.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.”

Author: Kiran Desai
Date: 2025
Genre:
Country: USA

In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.

Back in India, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two—a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next.

Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Date: 1962
Genre: Magical Realism, Fantasy, Metafiction, Surrealism
Country: UK

Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface, Andre Maurois writes: “Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style.”

Author: Albert Camus
Date: 1956
Genre: Philosophical novel
Country: France

Jean-Baptiste Clamence is a soul in turmoil. Over several drunken nights in an Amsterdam bar, he regales a chance acquaintance with his story. From this successful former lawyer and seemingly model citizen a compelling, self-loathing catalogue of guilt, hypocrisy and alienation pours forth.

Author: José Saramago
Date: 1995
Genre: Post-apocalyptic
Country: Portugal

A driver waiting at the traffic lights goes blind. An ophthalmologist tries to diagnose his distinctive white blindness, but is affected before he can read the textbooks.

It becomes a contagion, spreading throughout the city. Trying to stem the epidemic, the authorities herd the afflicted into a mental asylum where the wards are terrorised by blind thugs. And when fire destroys the asylum, the inmates burst forth and the last links with a supposedly civilised society are snapped.

Author: Doris Lessing
Date: 1962
Genre: 
Country: UK

Two women talk, and what they say is explosive. One woman writes, and each part of her becomes a fragment set down in a different notebook. Torn apart by marriage, love affairs, children, and a neurotic society, the one woman, Anna, is going to pieces, breaking down–and finally coming to terms with herself as a total, complete human being…a woman who truly understands herself.

Author: Simone de Beauvoir
Date: 1954
Genre: 
Country: France

In her most famous novel, Simone de Beauvoir does not flinch in her look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of the Second World War. Drawing on those who surrounded her—Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler—and her passionate love affair with Nelson Algren, Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desire and her public life.

Author: James Baldwin
Date: 1956
Genre: LGBTQ+
Country: USA

Baldwin’s haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.

Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Date: 1962
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: Russia

This crisp, shattering glimpse of the fate of millions of Russians under Stalin shook Russia and shocked the world when it first appeared. Khrushchev himself, during the Russian thaw, is said to have authorized the publication of this spare, stark description of life in a Siberian labour camp.

Author: E. Annie Proulx
Date: 1993
Genre: 
Country: USA

The novel follows the story of a depressed and overweight man who moves with his two daughters to his ancestral home in Newfoundland, Canada, after his unfaithful wife dies in a car accident. There, he begins to rebuild his life, working as a reporter for the local newspaper, The Shipping News, and learning about the harsh realities of the fishing industry. As he delves into his family’s history, he begins to find a sense of belonging and a new love. The story explores themes of family, identity, and the power of place.

Author: Haruki Murakami
Date: 1997
Genre: 
Country: Japan

A man’s search for his wife’s missing cat evolves into a surreal journey through Tokyo’s underbelly, where he encounters a bizarre collection of characters with strange stories and peculiar obsessions. As he delves deeper, he finds himself entangled in a web of dreamlike scenarios, historical digressions, and metaphysical investigations. His reality becomes increasingly intertwined with the dream world as he grapples with themes of fate, identity, and the dark side of the human psyche.

Author: Arundhati Roy
Date: 1997
Genre:
Country: India

This novel is a poignant tale of fraternal twins, a boy and a girl, who navigate through their childhood in Kerala, India, amidst a backdrop of political unrest and societal norms. The story, set in 1969, explores the complexities of their family’s history and the tragic events that shape their lives. Their mother’s transgression of caste and societal norms by having an affair with an untouchable leads to disastrous consequences, revealing the oppressive nature of the caste system and the destructive power of forbidden love. The novel also delves into themes of postcolonial identity, gender roles, and the lingering effects of trauma.

Author: Junot Díaz
Date: 2007
Genre:
Country: USA