Adventure & Journey

1

The Shadow of the Wind

Miguel de Cervantes

In post-civil-war Barcelona, a boy discovers a novel by the obscure Daniel Sempere and embarks on a decades-long quest to find his other books, only to find someone is destroying every copy. A bestselling love letter to books and Barcelona.

Spain 2001

2

Don Quixote

Miguel de Cervantes

An aging Spaniard so obsessed with chivalric romances that he sets out as a self-appointed knight errant, accompanied by his squire Sancho Panza, to revive knighthood and right the world's wrongs. Widely considered the first modern novel.

Spain 1605

3

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson

Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist investigates the forty-year-old disappearance of a wealthy family's niece with the help of brilliant, damaged hacker Lisbeth Salander. The first book in Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.

Sweden 2005

4

If on a winter's night a traveler

Italo Calvino

A novel addressed directly to "you, the reader," who begins reading a novel that turns out to be the wrong book — initiating a series of interrupted narratives. Calvino's most playful and postmodern work.

Italy 1979

5

Foucault's Pendulum

Umberto Eco

Three Milan editors invent a conspiracy theory connecting the Knights Templar to every major secret society in history — and find that the conspiracy takes on a life of its own. Eco's most intellectually demanding novel.

Italy 1988

6

The Name of the Rose

Umberto Eco

Franciscan friar William of Baskerville investigates a series of murders at an Italian abbey in 1327 with his novice Adso of Melk. Eco's debut novel blends a detective thriller with semiotic theory, medieval history, and literary theory.

Italy 1980

7

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville

The narrator Ishmael joins the obsessive Captain Ahab's vengeful quest for the white whale that took his leg. Melville's encyclopaedic novel about whaling, obsession, fate, and the American character was a commercial failure in its time.

United States 1851