The Leopard was first published posthumously in 1958 in Italian as ‘Il Gattopardo’. In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: ‘Some huge irrational disaster is in the making.’ All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the […]

In this novel of 1924 Thomas Mann (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann) offers us a dizzyingly rich book of ideas. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps – a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and

This a 1967 book, written in the late 1930s, by Mikhail Bulgakov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bulgakov) It is an intriguing read and has acquired something of a cult status. Written during the darkest period of Stalin’s repressive regime, it is a satire on Soviet life. The book combines two parts: one set in contemporary Moscow and the other

Based on Mailer’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Mailer) own experience of military service in the Philippines during World War Two, The Naked and the Dead is a graphically truthful and shattering portrayal of ordinary men in battle. First published in 1949, as America was still basking in the glories of the Allied victory, it altered forever the popular perception of

This fantastically rich novel (1980) from Umberto Eco (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco) is set in Italy in the Middle Ages. It is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders, and a compendium of heretical movements. A thick slab

The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Erskine_Childers) is an early spy/adventure novel set during the long suspicious years leading up to the First World War. In spite of good prospects in the Foreign Office, sardonic civil servant, Carruthers, is finding it hard to endure the emptiness and boredom of his life in London. He accepts

Iris Murdoch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Murdoch) found time to write 26 novels whilst pursuing a career as a philosophy lecturer at Oxford. The Sea, The Sea (1978) has the following outline. Charles Arrowby, leading light of England’s theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea. He plans to write a memoir about his

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) is a novel of love and politics in communist-run Czechoslovakia between 1968 and the early 1980s. It is laced with straightforward political and philosophical speculations. One feels the characters are only half drawn. This gives the work an odd tone of helpless existential detachment. Choices are shown to be irrevocable and

Things Fall Apart (1958) tells how Okonkwo, a great warrior of an Ibo village in Nigeria falls from grace in his tribal world. The conflict between the individual and society is no better or more wisely illustrated. A second story depicts the proselytizing European missionaries who threaten to destroy the existing indigenous culture. Writing from an insider vantage point