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

First published in 1847–48, Vanity Fair  satirizes society in early 19th-century Britain and in particular the attachment to material things. No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however,

Patrick Victor Martindale White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White) was an Australian author who was widely regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, White published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantagepoints and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the

In five linked episodes in A Hero of Our Time (1839), early Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lermontov) builds up the portrait of a Byronic hero officer, Grigory Pechorin, caught up in and expressing the sickness of his age. The sickness is a certain ennui, nihilism and indifference to the world. The setting is Russian military

A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is V.S. Naipaul’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul) unforgettable third novel. Born the ‘wrong way’ and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence

In A Farewell to Arms (1929) a young American volunteer goes to Italy during the First World War. This is a love story interwoven with a savage indictment of the brutalities of war. It is all the more remarkable given the coolness and impartiality of tone with which the author delivers the narrative. One may not warm