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Anxious People by Fredrik Backman (Michael Joseph) — a building is held hostage by a man with a gun, and the eight people inside — with their histories, failures, secrets, and unexpected connections — form the subject of a police investigation that is also a meditation on the walls people build around themselves and call protection. Backman’s most formally inventive novel: a comedy about tragedy built with the precision of a Swiss watch. Published by Michael Joseph.

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.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Penguin Modern Classics) — the Joad family drives west from the Dust Bowl on Route 66 toward California and the promise of work, and finds exploitation, contempt, and organised resistance. Written in 1939 in a state of moral fury, it is the greatest American social novel of the twentieth century — technically extraordinary, built around characters of such specific humanity that their suffering is not an argument but an experience. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (Penguin Modern Classics) — seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, where the miraculous and the mundane are indistinguishable and the patterns of history repeat until they reach their inevitable end. The novel that invented magic realism as a literary mode and changed what fiction is allowed to do. Winner of the Nobel Prize. The essential Latin American novel. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Castle by Franz Kafka (Penguin Modern Classics) — K. arrives claiming to be a land surveyor summoned by the Castle, which governs everything from its hill above the village and yet is constitutionally unable to communicate clearly with anyone. Kafka’s final and longest novel — in some respects even more unsettling than The Trial, its system not malevolent but opaque, indifferent, and irreducibly mysterious. 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.

The Imitation of the Rose by Clarice Lispector (Penguin) — one of the most disturbing and most formally perfect short stories of the twentieth century, in which a woman’s too-perfectly-ordered house reveals a mind at the edge of breakdown. This Penguin Little Black Classic gathers it alongside other essential Lispector works — a concentrated introduction to a writer who uses ordinary surfaces to reveal extraordinary inner states. Published by Penguin.

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (Penguin Modern Classics) — one of the great satirical novels of the twentieth century, in which a fictional religion called Bokononism, a Caribbean dictator, and a substance called ice-nine converge on the end of the world with hilarious and devastating results. Funnier than it has any right to be about the end of everything. Essential Vonnegut. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Outsider by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics) — the novel that launched absurdism as a cultural movement. Meursault’s flat, affectless narration of a crime he barely understands generates one of the most quietly devastating philosophical provocations in modern fiction. This fresh, acclaimed translation restores the neutrality of Camus’s original French. One of the essential European novels. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Modern Classics) — Kerouac’s most spiritually sincere novel, replacing the horizontal motion of On the Road with the vertical discipline of mountain climbing and Zen meditation. His portrait of the poet Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder remains one of American literature’s most convincing portraits of how a person can be fully, completely alive. 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.

Philosophy in the Bedroom by the Marquis de Sade (Penguin) — the most philosophically explicit of de Sade’s works, presenting his radical libertine philosophy through a dialogic structure that combines argument and narrative. Essential for serious students of the European radical Enlightenment, the history of ideas, and the limits of philosophical reason. Published by Penguin.

The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade (Penguin Modern Classics) — written in the Bastille in 1785, one of the most notorious works in Western literary history. This Penguin Modern Classics edition presents the text with full scholarly apparatus for serious students of literature and philosophy. Trans. Will McMorran and Thomas Wynn.

Homo Faber by Max Frisch (Penguin Modern Classics) — UNESCO engineer Walter Faber’s rationalist worldview is shattered when coincidences reveal a suppressed truth about his past. A gripping tragedy and parable about the limits of the technological mind, written in prose perfectly calibrated to its narrator. Trans. Michael Bullock.

The Forsyte Saga: Volume 3 by John Galsworthy (Penguin Modern Classics) — the final volume of the Nobel Prize-winning family chronicle. The Forsyte story reaches its conclusion in inter-war Britain with characteristic irony, compassion, and finely judged social observation.

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.

The Plague by Albert Camus (Penguin Modern Classics) — Camus’s meditation on suffering, solidarity, and the human condition during a bubonic plague in Oran. Read as allegory of the Nazi occupation. Robin Buss’s acclaimed translation captures the measured clarity of Camus’s finest prose.