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George Eliot’s panoramic masterpiece — widely regarded as the greatest novel in English, tracing the aspirations and disappointments of a whole Midlands community in the 1830s. Dorothea Brooke and a cast of fully realised humanity: the novel at its greatest extent, in a Wordsworth Classics edition.

The novel that launched Dickens’s career — the picaresque adventures of Samuel Pickwick and companions, episodic and exuberant with a comic energy uniquely its own. Published in 1836 and making Dickens famous overnight: an essential introduction to the greatest Victorian novelist in a Wordsworth Classics edition.

Hemingway’s 1926 masterpiece — Jake Barnes, Brett Ashley, and the Lost Generation adrift in Paris and Pamplona, living brilliantly and feeling nothing. Revolutionary prose style and one of modern fiction’s most vivid accounts of post-war disillusionment. The essential Hemingway text.

Mark Twain’s subversive Victorian parody — brief, deadpan, and delightfully undermining adult hypocrisy through the form of improving literature for children. A small gem of American humour, illustrated in this Chronicle Books edition with fresh visual life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 masterpiece — Jay Gatsby, the American Dream, and the particular glamour and emptiness of a world built on illusion. Prose of extraordinary beauty and one of the century’s most devastating portraits of aspiration and its discontents.

Jane Austen’s perfect comedy of manners and one of the great love stories ever written — Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, first impressions, and the willingness to be wrong about oneself. Sharp, funny, and absolutely modern, 200 years after it first appeared.

The Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka (Vintage) — every piece of Kafka’s short fiction in a single volume: ‘The Metamorphosis’, ‘In the Penal Colony’, ‘A Hunger Artist’, the animal stories, the parables, the miniatures, the fragments. Each piece demonstrating the same formal mastery: a premise established with deadpan certainty, a logic pursued to its inevitable conclusion, an effect combining comedy and horror in proportions that never resolve. The essential Kafka collection. Published by Vintage.

Molloy by Samuel Beckett (Faber) — an old man lying in his room, writing; a detective sent to find him. What follows, in Beckett’s first novel of his trilogy, is a journey that is also a decomposition of narrative, identity, and the certainty that language can tell us anything reliable about the world or ourselves. One of the most radical acts of fiction ever committed to paper — essential world literature. Published by Faber & Faber.

Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse (Penguin) — the strange, beautiful late stories in which Hesse uses the old forms of fairy tale and parable as containers for the most modern of anxieties about consciousness, meaning, and the relationship between reason and feeling. A Penguin Little Black Classic showing a dimension of Hesse that readers who know only Siddhartha will find surprising — lighter in tone, no less serious in inquiry. Published by Penguin.

A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka (Penguin) — one of the most compressed and resonant parables in world literature: a professional faster whose audience has stopped coming, placed in a circus cage next to the animal stalls, whose dying confession reveals the secret he has kept for a lifetime. A Penguin Little Black Classic gathering Kafka’s essential late stories — sixty pages of pure formal genius that reward a lifetime of rereading. Published by Penguin.

Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig (Penguin Modern Classics) — Zweig’s only completed novel, and one of the masterpieces of European fiction. A young cavalry officer’s inability to be honest with a young woman who loves him initiates a tragedy of terrible inevitability — a book of complete psychological precision about the mechanics of self-deception and the suffering produced by weakness rather than cruelty. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn (Penguin Modern Classics) — the finest Western engagement with the Japanese supernatural tradition, written by the American writer who settled in Japan in the 1890s and spent his life transmitting a culture that fascinated him completely. These stories of the dead who linger and the spirits who inhabit the liminal spaces are atmospheric, culturally illuminating, and genuinely unsettling. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote (Penguin Modern Classics) — one of the great American novellas, a portrait of the elusive Holly Golightly in prose as polished and precise as anything Capote wrote. Includes three further stories — ‘House of Flowers’, ‘A Diamond Guitar’, and ‘A Christmas Memory’ — making this the ideal introduction to Capote’s short fiction at its most accomplished. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

One Billion Years to the End of the World by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Penguin Modern Classics) — Soviet science fiction at its most philosophically ambitious. A theoretical physicist on the verge of a breakthrough finds himself systematically interrupted by a universe that seems determined to prevent his discovery. A tightly plotted, psychologically acute masterpiece of the genre. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Star by Yukio Mishima (Penguin) — a short, brilliant novella in which a young film star discovers that celebrity has made him a surface onto which audiences project what they need, while behind the screen there is less and less of him. A contemporary, darkly satirical Mishima — neglected until now, and essential for anyone who wants to understand his full range. Published by Penguin.

The Besieged City by Clarice Lispector (Penguin Modern Classics) — Lispector’s third novel follows Lucrécia Neves as a new road transforms her small Brazilian town, in a novel about consciousness and place written in a prose style of radical formal ambition. One of the most formally adventurous works of its era, now finally available in English. Essential Lispector. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel that launched the Beat Generation and defined a way of being alive that has influenced every writer, musician, and filmmaker who came after it. Written in three weeks of inspired composition, it has the energy and immediacy of something too urgent to be edited. Essential American literature. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka (Penguin) — one of Kafka’s most loved late stories, in which a philosophically obsessed dog investigates the great questions of canine existence with deadpan rigour. A precise satire of intellectual inquiry, a meditation on the limits of bounded knowledge, and a masterpiece of dark Kafkaesque comedy. A Penguin Little Black Classic. Published by Penguin.