Joseph Conrad’s masterpiece about a life-changing journey in search of Mr Kurtz has the simplicity of great myth.
Theodore Dreiser was no stylist, but there’s a terrific momentum to his unflinching novel about a country girl’s American dream.
In Kipling’s classic boy’s own spy story, an orphan in British India must make a choice between east and west.
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)Jack London’s vivid adventures of a pet dog that goes back to nature reveal an extraordinary style and consummate storytelling.
American literature contains nothing else quite like Henry James’s amazing, labyrinthine and claustrophobic novel.
This entertaining if contrived story of a hack writer and priest who becomes pope sheds vivid light on its eccentric author – described by DH Lawrence as a “man-demon”.
The evergreen tale from the riverbank and a powerful contribution to the mythology of Edwardian England.
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)The choice is great, but Wells’s ironic portrait of a man very like himself is the novel that stands out.
The passage of time has conferred a dark power upon Beerbohm’s ostensibly light and witty Edwardian satire.
Ford’s masterpiece is a searing study of moral dissolution behind the facade of an English gentleman – and its stylistic influence lingers to this day.
John Buchan’s espionage thriller, with its sparse, contemporary prose, is hard to put down.
The Rainbow is perhaps DH Lawrence’s finest work, showing him for the radical, protean, thoroughly modern writer he was.
Somerset Maugham’s semi-autobiographical novel shows the author’s savage honesty and gift for storytelling at their best.
The story of a blighted New York marriage stands as a fierce indictment of a society estranged from culture.
This portrait of a day in the lives of three Dubliners remains a towering work, in its word play surpassing even Shakespeare.
What it lacks in structure and guile, this enthralling take on 20s America makes up for in vivid satire and characterisation.
EM Forster’s most successful work is eerily prescient on the subject of empire.
A guilty pleasure it may be, but it is impossible to overlook the enduring influence of a tale that helped to define the jazz age.
Woolf’s great novel makes a day of party preparations the canvas for themes of lost love, life choices and mental illness.
Fitzgerald’s jazz age masterpiece has become a tantalising metaphor for the eternal mystery of art.
A young woman escapes convention by becoming a witch in this original satire about England after the first world war.
Hemingway’s first and best novel makes an escape to 1920s Spain to explore courage, cowardice and manly authenticity.
Dashiell Hammett’s crime thriller and its hard-boiled hero Sam Spade influenced everyone from Chandler to Le Carré.
The influence of William Faulkner’s immersive tale of raw Mississippi rural life can be felt to this day.
Aldous Huxley’s vision of a future human race controlled by global capitalism is every bit as prescient as Orwell’s more famous dystopia.
The book for which Gibbons is best remembered was a satire of late-Victorian pastoral fiction but went on to influence many subsequent generations.
The middle volume of John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy is revolutionary in its intent, techniques and lasting impact.
The US novelist’s debut revelled in a Paris underworld of seedy sex and changed the course of the novel – though not without a fight with the censors.
060 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
Evelyn Waugh’s Fleet Street satire remains sharp, pertinent and memorable.
Samuel Beckett’s first published novel is an absurdist masterpiece, a showcase for his uniquely comic voice.
Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled debut brings to life the seedy LA underworld – and Philip Marlowe, the archetypal fictional detective.
Set on the eve of war, this neglected modernist masterpiece centres on a group of bright young revellers delayed by fog.
Labyrinthine and multilayered, Flann O’Brien’s humorous debut is both a reflection on, and an exemplar of, the Irish novel.
One of the greatest of great American novels, this study of a family torn apart by poverty and desperation in the Great Depression shocked US society.
PG Wodehouse’s elegiac Jeeves novel, written during his disastrous years in wartime Germany, remains his masterpiece.
A compelling story of personal and political corruption, set in the 1930s in the American south.
Malcolm Lowry’s masterpiece about the last hours of an alcoholic ex-diplomat in Mexico is set to the drumbeat of coming conflict.
Elizabeth Bowen’s 1948 novel perfectly captures the atmosphere of London during the blitz while providing brilliant insights into the human heart.
George Orwell’s dystopian classic cost its author dear but is arguably the best-known novel in English of the 20th century.
