Novels by Plot

The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough, 1977)

A young woman's passion for a priest drives much of this epic saga of 3 generations of Australian sheep farmers

The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald, 1995)

It is a first-person account of a nameless narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk

The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler, 1939)

The first novel to feature detective Philip Marlow; the title is a euphemism for death

Those Who Love (Irving Stone, 1965)

This is a biographical novel of John Adams & his wife Abigail

Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais, 1532-1564)

This pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century tells of the adventures of two giants, and features much crudity, scatological humor, and violence; the censors at the Sorbonne labeled it as obscene

The Sellout (Paul Beatty, 2015)

This satire concerns a narrator, referred to only by his last name, "Me", who grows watermelons and artisanal marijuana, and attempts to reintroduce slavery and segregation in his Los Angeles neighborhood, Dickens. (First book by an American to win Man Booker Prize)

Ragtime (1975)

This work of historical fiction is mainly set in the New York City area from 1902 until 1912; the novel blends fictional and historical figures into a framework that revolves around events, characters, and ideas important in American history

The Europeans (Henry James, 1878)

2 expatriates come to Boston to visit relatives

The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006)

A boy & his dad's journey through a post-apocalyptic U.S.A.

Blindness (Jose Saramago, 1995)

A city is hit by an epidemic of sight loss & the afflicted are confined to an empty hospital

Rock Springs (Richard Ford, 1987)

A collection of short stories largely dealing with dysfunctional mothers and fathers and their effects on young male narrators

The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1951)

A controversial novel originally published for adults, it has since become popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage angst and alienation

A Dance to the Music of Time (Anthony Powell, 1951-1975)

A cycle of 12 novels; the story is an often comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century

Neuromancer (William Gibson, 1984)

A data thief targets a giant computer mind orbiting Earth

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (Carson McCullers, 1940)

A deaf-mute becomes a perfect confidant for others in a small Georgia town; the author was 23 at the time of publication

I, Claudius (Robert Graves, 1934)

A fictional autobiography, it includes the history of the Julio-Claudian Dynasty and the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar's assassination in 44 BC to Caligula's assassination in 41 AD

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf, 1925)

A fictional high-society woman in post-First World War England prepares for a party she will host that evening

The Golden Man (Philip K. Dick, 1953)

A gold-skinned mutant called Cris is captured by the government, which attempts to execute him. However, his appearance and abilities to see into the future allow him to escape; only 11,600 words

The Recognitions (1955)

A man leaves New England and travels to Europe to study painting, then returns to New York where he forges paintings in the names of Flemish and Dutch Masters

Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis, 1954)

A medieval history lecturer at a Red brick university in the English Midlands struggles with trying to gain tenure while dealing with romantic frustration with a fellow lecturer

The Day of the Jackal (Frederick Forsyth, 1971)

A professional killer plots to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in this thriller

The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1911)

A sickly and unloved 10-year-old girl (Mary), was born in India to wealthy British parents who never wanted her. She is cared for by servants, who allow her to become a spoiled child, until she discovers the title place which heals her crippled friend Colin

The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James, 1881)

A spirited young American woman inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates

Life of Pi (Yan Martel, 2001)

A storm sinks the freighter Tsimtsum, setting the title character adrift in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger

American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)

A successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete has his happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk"

Lost Horizon (James Hilton, 1933)

A veteran member of the British diplomatic service finds inner peace in the Himalayas

A Passage to India (E.M. Forster, 1924)

A woman (Adela) thinks she finds herself alone with Dr. Aziz in one of the caves, and subsequently panics and flees; it is assumed that Dr. Aziz has attempted to assault her. Aziz's trial, and its run-up and aftermath, bring to a boil the common racial tensions and prejudices between Indians and the British who rule India

Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser, 1900)

A young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream, first as a mistress to men that she perceives as superior, and later becoming a famous actress

Animal Farm (George Orwell, 1945)

An allegorical novella that reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union

An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser, 1925)

An ambitious young American of low birth murders the woman who is pregnant with his child

Planet of the Apes (Pierre Boulle, 1963)

Astronauts land on another world where humans are savages & chimps are civilized

The Berlin Stories (Christopher Isherwood, 1945)

Berlin is portrayed during the transition period of Hitler coming to power as a city of cafes and quaint avenues, grotesque nightlife and dreamers, and powerful mobs and millionaires

The March (E.L. Doctorow, 2005)

Central to the novel is the character of General William Tecumseh Sherman as he marches his 60,000 troops through the heart of the South, carving a 60-mile-wide scar of destruction in their wake

Gravity's Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon, 1973)

Featuring a large cast of characters, 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

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis, 1950)

Four English children are relocated to a large, old country house following a wartime evacuation, and the youngest finds a magic land via a piece of furniture in a spare room

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

In 1930s Edinburgh, six ten-year-old girls, Sandy, Rose, Mary, Jenny, Monica, and Eunice are assigned the titular teacher. Under her mentorship, these six girls begin to stand out from the rest of the school. However, in one of the novel's typical flash-forwards we learn that one of them will later betray her teacher, ruining her teaching career, but that she will never learn which one

The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

In the far-distant future, the Morlocks prey upon the Eloi

The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood, 2000)

Iris Chase, and her sister Laura, grow up well-off but motherless in a small town in Southern Ontario. As an old woman, Iris recalls the events and relationships of her childhood, youth and middle age, including her unhappy marriage to Toronto businessman Richard Griffen

Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1952)

It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing African-Americans early in the twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather, 1927)

It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory

Appointment in Samarra (John O'Hara, 1934)

It concerns the self-destruction and suicide of a wealthy car dealer who was once a member of the social elite of Gibbsville

The Torrents of Spring (Ernest Hemingway, 1926)

It concerns two men who work at a pump factory, World War I veteran Yogi Johnson and writer Scripps O'Neill. Both are searching for the perfect woman, though they disagree over this ideal

Midnight's Children (Salman Rushdie, 1981)

It deals with India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India, and is considered an example of postcolonial literature and magical realism

Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell, 1936)

It depicts the struggles of young, spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive "March to the Sea"

The Painted Bird (Jerzy Kosinski, 1965)

It describes World War II as seen by a boy, considered a "Gypsy or Jewish stray," wandering about small villages scattered around an unspecified country in Eastern Europe. Within two decades it was discovered that the story was not only fictional, but also plagiarized from popular books written in the Polish language, largely unknown to English readers

Loving (Henry Green, 1945)

It describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe

Tender Is the Night (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934)

It details the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients; fourth and final novel published in his lifetime

The Assistant (Bernard Malamud, 1957)

It explores the situation of first- and second-generation Americans in the early 1950s as experienced by three main characters and the relationships between them: an aging Jewish refugee from Tsarist Russia who owns and operates a failing small grocery store, a young Italian American drifter trying to overcome a bad start in life by becoming the grocer's assistant and the grocer's daughter, who becomes romantically involved with her father's assistant despite parental objections and misgivings of her own

The Adventures of Augie March (Saul Bellow, 1953)

It features the title character who grows up during the Great Depression in Chicago and is an example of bildungsroman, tracing the development of an individual through a series of encounters, occupations and relationships from boyhood to manhood

Three Junes (Julia Glass, 2002)

It follows the McLeods, a Scottish family, throughout their lives and relationships. Its members are Paul and Maureen, and their sons: Fenno, and twins David and Dennis; won National Book Award

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh, 1945)

It follows, from the 1920s to the early 1940s, the life and romances of the protagonist Charles Ryder, including his friendship with the Flytes, a family of wealthy English Catholics who live in a palatial mansion called Brideshead Castle

Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

It is a continuous monologue as narrated by its speaker, "a lust-ridden, mother addicted young Jewish bachelor," to his psychoanalyst

Mating (Norman Rush, 1991)

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 anthropologist who has founded an experimental matriarchal village in the Kalahari desert

At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O'Brian, 1939)

It is a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature, who lives with his uncle who works at the Guinness brewery

On the Road (Jack Kerouac, 1957)

It is a roman à clef, with many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee), Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty) represented by characters in the book, including the author as the narrator Sal Paradise

The Way of All Flesh (Samuel Butler, 1903)

It is a semi-autobiographical novel that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy; written between 1873 and 1884, it traces four generations of the Pontifex family

Women in Love (D.H. Lawrence, 1920)

It is a sequel to The Rainbow (1915), and follows the continuing loves and lives of the Brangwen sisters, Gudrun and Ursula

Parallel Lives (Plutarch, early 2nd century)

It is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, probably written at the beginning of the second century AD

The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon, 1966)

It is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero

Herzog (Saul Bellow, 1964)

It is about the midlife crisis of a Jewish man named Moses. At the age of forty-seven, he is just emerging from his second divorce, this one particularly acrimonious. He has two children, one by each wife, who are growing up without him

The Time of the Hero (Mario Vargas Llosa, 1963)

It is set among the cadets at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, which the author attended as a teenager. The novel portrays the school so scathingly that its leadership burned a large number of copies and condemned the book as Ecuadorian propaganda against Peru

Inkspell (Cornelia Funke, 2005)

It is the second novel the Inkheart trilogy

A House for Mr. Biswas (V.S. Naipaul, 1961)

It is the story of an Indo-Trinidadian who continually strives for success and mostly fails, who marries into the Tulsi family only to find himself dominated by it, and who finally sets the goal of owning his own house

All the King's Men (Robert Penn Warren, 1946)

It portrays the dramatic political rise and governorship of a cynical populist in the American South during the 1930s

The Guns of Navarone (Alistair MacLean, 1957)

It portrays the efforts of an Allied commando team to destroy a seemingly impregnable German fortress that threatens Allied naval ships in the Aegean Sea

Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad, 1899-1900)

It regards the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including, the title character, a young British seaman. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with himself and his past

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005)

It revolves around students at a boarding school who are are clones being groomed to be organ donors, a process that will end their lives

The Corrections (Jonathan Franzen, 2001)

It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-20th century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium

War Trash (Ha Jin, 2004)

It takes the form of a memoir written by the fictional character Yu Yuan, a man who eventually becomes a soldier in the Chinese People's Volunteer Army and who is sent to Korea to fight on the Communist side in the Korean War

Native Son (Richard Wright, 1940)

It tells the story of 20-year-old African-American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s

Falconer (John Cheever, 1977)

It tells the story of Ezekiel Farragut, a university professor and drug addict who is serving time in state prison for the murder of his brother

Go Tell It on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953)

It tells the story of John Grimes, an intelligent teenager in 1930s Harlem, and his relationship to his family and his church

The Black Arrow (Robert Louis Stevenson, 1888)

It tells the story of Richard (Dick) Shelton during the Wars of the Roses: how he becomes a knight, rescues his lady Joanna Sedley, and obtains justice for the murder of his father, Sir Harry Shelton

The Power and the Glory (1940)

It tells the story of a renegade Roman Catholic 'whisky priest' living in the Mexican state of Tabasco in the 1930s, a time when the Mexican government was attempting to suppress the Catholic Church

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Thornton Wilder, 1927)

It tells the story of several interrelated people who die in the collapse of an Inca rope bridge in Peru, and the events that lead up to their being on the bridge. A friar who has witnessed the accident then goes about inquiring into the lives of the victims, seeking some sort of cosmic answer to the question of why each had to die

The Pale King (David Foster Wallace, 2011)

It was planned as Wallace's third novel, and the first since Infinite Jest in 1996, but it was not completed at the time of his suicide in 2008

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Judy Blume, 1970)

It's about a sixth-grade girl who has grown up without a religious affiliation, due to her parents' interfaith marriage, and explores her quest for a single religion

Play It as It Lays (Joan Didion, 1970)

Maria's story begins as she is recovering from a mental breakdown in a psychiatric hospital in the Los Angeles area, but soon flashes back to her life before the hospital. A not-quite lurid view of life in Hollywood follows. Maria's journey oscillates between dizzying and domestic, as her acting career slows and her personal life collapses, including the suicide of her friend BZ

Deliverance (James Dickey, 1970)

Narrated in the first person by one of the main characters, graphic artist Ed Gentry, the novel begins with four middle-aged men in a large Georgia city planning a weekend canoe trip down the fictional Cahulawassee River in the north Georgia wilderness

Where Angels Fear to Tread (E.M. Forster, 1905)

On a journey to Tuscany with her young friend and traveling companion Caroline Abbott, widowed Lilia Herriton falls in love with an Italian man named Gino, a handsome Italian much younger than herself, and decides to stay

Y: The Last Man (Brian K. Vaughn, 2002)

Only women survive a mysterious plague except for Yorick Brown & his monkey Ampersand

The Confessions of Nat Turner (William Styron, 1967)

Presented as a first-person historical narrative, the novel concerns the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831

The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954-1955)

Probably the most famous fantasy book series of all-time

Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson, 1980)

Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939)

Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work

Ramona (Helen Hunt Jackson, 1884)

Set in Southern California after the Mexican-American War, it portrays the life of a mixed-race Scots-Native American orphan girl, who suffers racial discrimination and hardship

A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1962)

Set in a near future English society featuring a subculture of extreme youth violence, the teenage protagonist, Alex, narrates his violent exploits and his experiences with state authorities intent on reforming him

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey, 1962)

Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of the institutional processes and the human mind as well as a critique of behaviorism and a celebration of humanistic principles

Under the Skin (Michael Faber, 2000)

Set in northern Scotland, it traces an extraterrestrial who, manifesting in human form, drives around the Scottish countryside picking up male hitchhikers whom she drugs and delivers to her home planet

The Death of the Heart (Elizabeth Bowen, 1938)

Set in the interwar period, it is about a sixteen-year-old orphan, Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas and falls in love with Eddie, a friend of her sister-in-law

Atonement (Ian McEwan, 2001)

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

A Death in the Family (James Agee, 1957)

Started in 1948, it is an autobiographical account of the author's life that was unfinished as of his death in 1955

Ship of Fools (Katherine Ann Porter, 1962)

The 1962 tale of a group of disparate characters sailing from Mexico to Europe aboard a German passenger ship, which a name borrowed from a 1494 Swiss book

Red Harvest (1929)

The Continental Detective Agency sends a man to investigate murders in Personville, where he is framed for murder by the corrupt local police department

The Heart of the Matter (Graham Greene, 1948)

The book details a life-changing moral crisis for Henry Scobie. The author, a British intelligence officer in Freetown, Sierra Leone, drew on his experience there

The Bridges at Toko-Ri (James Michener, 1954)

The book details the experiences of United States Navy pilots in the Korean War as they undertake a mission to destroy heavily protected bridges in enemy territory

Lord of the Flies (William Golding, 1954)

The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves

Reading Lolita in Tehran (Azar Nafisi, 2003)

The book is a memoir of the experience of the author who returned to Iran during the revolution (1978-1981) and lived and taught in the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997

Call It Sleep (Henry Roth, 1934)

The book is about a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century

Lord of Misrule (Jaimy Gordon, 2010)

The book is divided into four sections, each concerned with one of four horse races at a "down on the luck" racetrack

Naked Lunch (William S. Burroughs, 1954)

The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes, that the author stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of a junkie who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone

The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields, 1993)

The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through marriage and motherhood, Daisy struggles to find contentment, never truly understanding her life's true purpose

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace, 1996)

The lengthy and complex work takes place in a North American dystopia, centering on a junior tennis academy and a nearby substance-abuse recovery center

The Moviegoer (Walker Percy, 1961)

The main character goes to Mardi Gras, hoping to break out of his caged everyday life. He launches a quest, in "search" of his inner self. Without any mental compass or sense of direction he wanders the streets of New Orleans' French Quarter, and Chicago, and then travels the Gulf Coast, interacting with his surroundings as he goes

Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy, 1985)

The majority of the story follows a teenager referred to only as "the kid," with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred Native Americans and others in the United States-Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit

Logan's Run (Nolan and Johnson, 1967)

The maximum age is 21 & don't try to get away

Money (Martin Amis, 1984)

The narrator is a successful director of adverts who is invited to New York City by Fielding Goodney, a film producer, to shoot his first film. The narrator is an archetypal hedonist and slob; he is usually drunk, an avid consumer of pornography and prostitutes, eats too much and, above all, spends too much

The Ides of March (Thornton Wilder, 1948)

The novel deals with the characters and events leading to, and culminating in, the assassination of Julius Caesar

Men of Maize (Miguel Angel Asturias, 1949)

The novel deals with the conflict between two types of men: the ones who consider corn to be a sacred food (the indigenous people of Guatemala); and those who view it simply as a commercial product

Rabbit, Run (1960)

The novel depicts three months in the life of a 26-year-old former high school basketball player who is trapped in a loveless marriage and a boring sales job, and his attempts to escape the constraints of his life

The French Lieutenant's Woman (John Fowles, 1969)

The novel explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love

Revolutionary Road (1961)

The novel focuses on the hopes and aspirations of Frank and April Wheeler, self-assured Connecticut suburbanites who see themselves as very different from their neighbors in the Revolutionary Hill Estates

After This (Alice McDermott, 2006)

The novel follows a working-class American family who reside on Long Island, New York and their four children, who are enduring their own experiences during the times of the sexual revolution. It is set during the mid-20th century, a time after the end of World War II, through to the presidency of Richard Nixon

Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)

The novel follows the life of Okonkwo, an Igbo ("Ibo" in the novel) leader and local wrestling champion in the fictional Nigerian village of Umuofia. The work is split into three parts, with the first describing his family, personal history, and the customs and society of the Igbo, and the second and third sections introducing the influence of British colonialism and Christian missionaries on the Igbo community

The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. LeGuin, 1969)

The novel follows the story of a native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets. His mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by his lack of understanding of Gethenian culture. Individuals on Gethen are "ambisexual", with no fixed sex

Possession (1990)

The novel 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

A Thousand Acres (Jane Smiley, 1991)

The novel is a modernized retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear and is set on a farm in Iowa that is owned by a family of a father and his three daughters. It is told through the point of view of the oldest daughter, Ginny

Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov, 1962)

The novel is presented as a 999-line poem, written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword and lengthy commentary written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, 1953)

The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier

1984 (George Orwell, 1949)

The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation

The Man Who Loved Children (Christina Stead, 1940)

The novel tells the story of a highly dysfunctional family, the Pollits. The naive egoism of the eponymous Sam Pollit overwhelms his family, especially his wife Henny and eldest daughter Louie

Planet of the Apes (Pierre Boulle, 1963)

The novel tells the tale of three human explorers from Earth who visit a planet orbiting the star Betelgeuse, in which great apes are the dominant intelligent and civilized species, whereas humans are reduced to a savage animal-like state

The Making of Americans (Gertrude Stein, 1925)

The novel traces the genealogy, history, and psychological development of members of the fictional Hersland and Dehning families

Light in August (William Faulkner, 1932)

The plot focuses on a young pregnant white woman from Alabama looking for the father of her unborn child, and then shifts to explore the life of a man who has settled the same Mississippi town and passes as white, but who secretly believes he has some black ancestry

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov, 1955)

The protagonist and unreliable narrator, a middle-aged literature professor, is obsessed with a 12-year-old, with whom he becomes sexually involved after he becomes her stepfather

A Handful of Dust (Evelyn Waugh, 1934)

The protagonist is Tony Last, a contented but shallow English country squire, who, having been betrayed by his wife and seen his illusions shattered one by one, joins an expedition to the Brazilian jungle, only to find himself trapped in a remote outpost as the prisoner of a maniac

An American Dream (Norman Mailer, 1965)

The protagonist is a decorated war-hero, former congressman and a sensationalist talk-show host. In an alcoholic rage, he murders his estranged wife, a high society woman, and descends into a lurid underworld of Manhattan jazz clubs, bars, and Mafia intrigue

Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)

The protagonist is a slave who escapes slavery, running to Cincinnati, Ohio. After 28 days of freedom, a posse arrives to retrieve her under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, so she kills her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured and taken back to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which she recently fled. A woman presumed to be her daughter returns years later to haunt her home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio

Tales of the South Pacific (James Michener, 1947)

The stories are based on observations and anecdotes the author collected while stationed as a lieutenant commander in the US Navy on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands (now known as Vanuatu).

The Sheltering Sky (1949)

The story centers on Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner. The journey, initially an attempt by Port and Kit to resolve their marital difficulties, is quickly fraught by the travelers' ignorance of the dangers that surround them

Dog Soldiers (Robert Stone, 1974)

The story features American journalist John Converse, a Vietnam correspondent during the war, Merchant Marine sailor Ray Hicks, Converse's wife Marge, and their involvement in a heroin deal gone bad

The Grifters (Donald Westlake, 1963)

The story of a conman who has a dysfunctional relationship with his mother

Elmer Gantry (Sinclair Lewis, 1926)

The title character becomes a successful Methodist minister despite his hypocrisy and serial sexual indiscretions

The Reivers (William Faulkner, 1962)

The title of this last book by William Faulkner refers to a couple young men who steal to get by after moving to Memphis

Day of the Locust (Nathanael West, 1939)

This Nathaniel West novel was a satiric take on 1930s Hollywood

Orlando (Virginia Woolf, 1928)

This book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history

The Golden Notebook (Doris Lessing, 1962)

This book explores mental and societal breakdown, and also contains a powerful anti-war and anti-Stalinist message, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a famed examination of the budding sexual and women's liberation movements

Germinal (Emile Zola, 1885)

This is a harsh and realistic story of a coalminers' strike in northern France in the 1860s

Gods and Generals (Jeff Shaara, 1996)

This novel relates events from 1858 through 1863 during the American Civil War, ending just as the two armies march toward Gettysburg