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A Happy Death by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel written before The Stranger, published posthumously in 1971. Mersault’s quest for a life that ends in genuine happiness, told with lyrical beauty and personal intensity. Essential for understanding the development of Camus’s art. Trans. Richard Howard.

Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel that launched existentialism as a cultural movement. Antoine Roquentin’s diary records his overwhelming confrontation with the meaningless facticity of existence — the existentialist vocabulary at its most vivid and accessible. First published in 1938. Trans. Robert Baldick.

The Forsyte Saga: Volume 1 by John Galsworthy (Penguin Modern Classics) — opens one of the great English family chronicles. The doomed marriage of solicitor Soames and the independent Irene, against the backdrop of a world between Victorian confidence and Edwardian dissolution. The work that earned Galsworthy the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges (Penguin Modern Classics) — seventeen tales from his landmark 1949 collection. Labyrinths, infinite libraries, and moments of absolute vision: these stories, in which metaphysics becomes the material of adventure, cemented Borges’s status as one of the twentieth century’s most important writers. Essential world literature.

Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (Penguin) — one of the most celebrated debut novels of the twenty-first century. A young American’s search for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis excavates the destroyed shtetl of Trachimbrod with formal invention, emotional power, and considerable humour. A modern classic of Holocaust literature.

The Epic of Gilgamesh (Penguin Classics) — the oldest surviving work of literary fiction, written over four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh’s quest for immortality following Enkidu’s death addresses friendship, mortality, and the meaning of a life with timeless force. Andrew George’s definitive translation.

Selected Short Stories by Honoré de Balzac (Penguin Classics) — an ideal introduction to the creator of the Comédie Humaine. These stories demonstrate Balzac’s appetite for social detail and psychological insight. Includes ‘Sarrasine’, the story at the centre of Barthes’s famous analysis S/Z. Translated by Sylvia Raphael.

The Monk by Matthew Lewis (Penguin Classics) — the most extreme and compelling of the original Gothic novels, written when Lewis was nineteen. The saintly monk Ambrosio’s catastrophic fall through the full catalogue of Gothic transgression scandalised readers in 1796 and still fascinates. Essential Gothic literature.