Society & Class

1

Middlemarch

Emily Brontë

The interlocking lives of the inhabitants of a provincial English town in the 1830s, focusing on the idealistic Dorothea Brooke and the ambitious young doctor Tertius Lydgate. Virginia Woolf called it "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

United Kingdom 1871

2

The Red and the Black

Victor Hugo

Ambitious young Julien Sorel, the son of a carpenter in Restoration France, rises through society by means of his intelligence and hypocrisy, only to destroy himself through passion. One of the first great psychological novels.

France 1830

3

Midaq Alley

Naguib Mahfouz

A self-contained alley in Cairo in the 1940s serves as a microcosm of Egyptian society, its residents' ambitions and desires crashing against poverty and tradition. One of Mahfouz's most critically praised early works.

Egypt 1947

4

Snow

Orhan Pamuk

A Turkish poet travels to the remote town of Kars, snowbound and cut off, to investigate a wave of suicides among young women forced to remove their headscarves. A brooding meditation on Islamism, secularism, and political violence.

Turkey 2002

5

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann

Young Hans Castorp visits his cousin at a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium for three weeks and stays for seven years, engaging in intellectual and philosophical debates with other patients as Europe drifts toward war. Mann's most ambitious novel.

Germany 1924

6

Blindness

José Saramago

An unexplained epidemic of "white blindness" strikes a city. The infected are herded into a quarantined asylum where society's structures rapidly collapse. Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning allegory of human vulnerability and moral failure.

Portugal 1995

7

The Trial

Franz Kafka

Josef K. is arrested one morning and subjected to a legal process whose nature and charges he can never determine. Kafka's second novel, published posthumously, is his most sustained exploration of bureaucratic alienation and existential helplessness.

Czech Republic 1925

8

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

The Joad family, Oklahoma tenant farmers ruined by the Dust Bowl, joins the mass migration west to California and finds exploitation instead of the promised land. Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of the Great Depression.

United States 1939

9

Lord of the Flies

William Golding

A group of British schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a wartime evacuation attempt to govern themselves — and descend into savagery. A disturbing allegory of the inherent darkness in human nature.

United Kingdom 1954

10

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

The orphan Oliver, born in a workhouse, runs away to London and falls in with a gang of thieves led by Fagin. Dickens's second novel was a biting attack on the Poor Law of 1834 and the treatment of children in Victorian England.

United Kingdom 1837

11

Emma

Jane Austen

The confident, clever Emma Woodhouse appoints herself matchmaker for the people around her, with disastrously misguided results. Austen described her protagonist as "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like."

United Kingdom 1815

12

The Plague

Albert Camus

A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and the townspeople struggle with confinement, fear, and death. Read as an allegory for the Nazi occupation, it is Camus's fullest statement of solidarity in the face of absurdity.

France 1947

13

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A young student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker, believing himself exempt from moral law. The novel follows his psychological disintegration under the weight of guilt, culminating in confession and the possibility of redemption.

Russia 1866