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Lists of must-read biographies almost always include this wonderful book. Mandela started writing this autobiography in prison and finished it right before becoming the president of South Africa. This inspiring story provides a glimpse into the end of apartheid and the blatant inequality in the country.

Do you find dinosaurs fascinating? If so, this is one of the must-read books on the subject. Steve Brusatte reveals the different dinosaurs that roamed the planet — and the different worlds in which they lived.

If you love science and history, this is a must-read book for you. In summary, here are 40 must-read books of all time:. Have we missed any must-read books? If so, leave a comment below to recommend some top books to read! Want to learn how to make money on YouTube? Good idea. YouTube offers tons of opportunities to convert views into cash—…. Oberlo uses cookies to provide necessary site functionality and improve your experience.

By using our website, you agree to our privacy policy. Skip to article content Post contents. Design your dream life Today. Classic Novels to Read 1. The Lord of the Rings by J. Rowling This global bestseller took the world by storm. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five is arguably one of the greatest anti-war books ever written.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. The Catcher in the Rye by J. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye is the classic coming-of-age story. The year is and ideas of femininity and the correct social roles for women are in flux.

Esther is torn between rebellion and conformity, between her ambitions to excel as a writer and a nagging wish simply to succumb to convention and marry her boyfriend Buddy. She realises that she has been handed a golden opportunity but she seems unable to take full advantage of it. She feels alienated from the excitements of city life and this feeling only increases when she fails to win acceptance on a prestigious writing course and is obliged to return to suburban life for the summer.

Her sense of misery and separation from the world makes Esther feel like she is trapped under a laboratory bell jar, deprived of all air. She struggles to make any connection with reality. However, before the Hollywood movie version made that novella famous, she gained attention and the Pulitzer Prize with her full- length novel, The Shipping News.

At the beginning of the book, the central character Quoyle is an unsuccessful newspaperman in New York, still brooding on the humiliations of his marriage to a woman who first betrayed him and then was killed in an accident, leaving him with two small children. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. The Celestine Prophecy is presented as a novel.

In the rain forests of Peru an ancient manuscript has been discovered. In its pages are nine insights into the nature and meaning of life.

The narrator of the story decides to head for South America to learn more of the manuscript and its spiritual truths but he discovers that the powers that be, in both state and Church, are disturbed by the idea that the insights will be further disseminated and are prepared to go to great lengths to stop this. As the narrator learns each insight, one by one, and sees each one begin to operate in his life, he is also obliged to escape the dangerous attentions of those who wish to keep the insights to themselves.

The story of The Celestine Prophecy is not always a particularly compelling one nor its characters particularly convincing. Redfield is no great novelist and his novel is intended primarily as a vehicle for the nine insights. These begin with the aware- ness that a new spiritual awakening is underway and that individuals can only achieve their full potential if they align themselves with it. From this basis, they move towards the revelation of how humans can evolve into a new dimension of existence.

Sophisticated sceptics may mock The Celestine Prophecy but, as its startling word-of-mouth success indicates, it speaks very directly to millions of people. He decides that, in future, he will make no conscious decisions about his life. Instead, he will allow the fall of the dice to determine his actions. He will merely put forward options and then let the dice choose between them. By this simple means he will shake himself out of the inertia and the tedium which have come to dominate his life.

By creating problems for myself I created thought. Appropriately for a novel so enthralled by the mysteries of chance and randomness, its author remains an enigma. Is he really a psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart? Could he even be H. Saint, author of a book called Memoirs of an Invisible Man? No one seems sure. What is certain is that The Dice Man is a novel like few others — a subversive, scary and liberating exploration of what life might be like if it was guided by the throw of a dice.

For the last thirty years he has been one of the most prominent interpreters of Buddhism to Western audiences, both through his writings and through the international organisation he founded and called Rigpa. To Western minds, the experience of dying is often seen as one that is too anxiety-provoking to contemplate.

To Rinpoche and other Buddhists, it is only through contemplation of death that the joys of life can be revealed. In his book, Rinpoche explains ideas of karma and rebirth which are central to a specifically Buddhist tradition but much of what he writes about the value of the impermanent world in which we presently find ourselves, about the nature of spirituality and the best means to nurture it, is applicable to the lives of us all. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying can help people of many faiths and none to understand the meaning of life and the place of death within it.

Nuland, How We Die J. So enormous has been the success of J. Her own story — her journey from struggling single mother to her present position as one of the richest and bestselling authors of all time — seems like a contemporary fairy story. Harry, of course, has secrets of which even he knows nothing and it is not long before the poor relative has been whisked away from the Dursleys and sent to Hogwarts.

There he meets new friends, tests out his skills as a wizard and learns just a little of the destiny which will pit him against Lord Voldemort in a titanic struggle of good against evil.

There is no doubt about the status of the Harry Potter volumes as life-changing books for many people. No writer has done more to inspire young readers with a love for fiction than she has and the first adventure of her bespectacled would- be wizard introduces him and us to Hogwarts, the most extraordinary school in the world, and to the assortment of beguiling characters who spend their time there.

Wind, Sand and Stars, first published on the eve of the Second World War, mixes philosophy and lyrical prose in its descriptions of flying on dangerous mail runs across the Sahara and some of the highest peaks in the Andes. Salinger has become as famous for his reclusiveness as he has for the quality of his work. His published output consists of one novel and a handful of short stories. He has not allowed any new work to appear in print since Yet he remains one of the most acclaimed American writers of the last century.

Much of his reputation rests on that one novel — The Catcher in the Rye. The book tells the story of troubled teenager Holden Caulfield who is about to be expelled from his boarding school. Appalled by the phoniness of the adult world, Holden runs away to New York and checks into a hotel where he begins to contemplate what the future holds for him. As he mooches about the city, struggling to make sense of life, himself and the opposite sex, he broods on possible courses of action.

Should he hitchhike out west and start a new life away from everybody he knows? Should he lose his virginity and, if so, how? Holden has his own literary opinions. They spend more on fast food than on movies, books, magazines, newspapers, videos, and recorded music — combined. And both for America and the rest of the world the consequences of that love are often disastrous.

For consumers the exponential expansion of fast food has meant a growing epidemic of obesity and all the health problems associated with it. For those in the production line of fast food, it has meant exploitation and poor working conditions.

Because of the myriad methods by which marketing men in the industry target the young, all the problems associated with fast food are likely to grow worse rather than better unless we radically change our attitudes to consumption. Read Fast Food Nation and you will never look at food and eating in the same way again. Steeped in the traditional ideas of economists, Schumacher was sufficient of an individual and a maverick to be able to think outside the box and to question some of the most basic assumptions of his peers.

Perhaps the best summary of his philosophy can be found in the subtitle to his most famous book. The central criticism he made of existing economic systems was not only that they ignored the real needs of real people but that all of them, especially western capitalism, encouraged an entirely unrealistic view of the world and its resources. Schumacher was a man ahead of his time — a remarkable intellectual pioneer of ecology, sustainable development and appropriate technology.

Galbraith, The Affluent Society; D. His men were forced to abandon ship and, after months of drifting on ice floes, to take refuge on the desolate Elephant Island. The boat came ashore on the opposite side of the island to the stations and Shackleton and his companions were obliged to make the first crossing of the mountainous South Georgia in order to reach them.

Eventually, all the men left on Elephant Island were rescued. It is one of the most harrowing and yet most uplifting of all stories of survival in a hostile environment. Like Jane Austen, whom she admired greatly, she was a novelist with an ability to write about apparently ordinary people, leading lives that might be considered, from the outside, to be narrow and restricted, and yet to find within her characters elements of the extraordinary.

In another sense her life is most uncon- ventional, including elements that would not have looked out of place in a magic-realist novel. Her mother dies in childbirth without even realising she is pregnant. A neighbour returns to his native Orkney and lives to the age of , proud of his ability to recite Jane Eyre from memory.

It mimics the form of a non-fiction biography with family tree, photographs of family members, excerpts from letters, journals, newspaper articles and so on.

In a poignant, knowing and funny nar- rative, Carol Shields carefully unfolds the remarkable story of a supposedly unremarkable woman. How far should we, as moral beings, consider these rights when we are making decisions which affect them?

In , the Australian philosopher Peter Singer published what has become, in many ways, the central text for the animal liberation movement. Speciesism is as morally reprehensible as racism and sexism.

Other species are sentient and as capable as us of suffering. But, Can they suffer? The campaign against speciesism may well prove one of the more important movements of the twenty-first century and it is impossible to imagine it without the work of Peter Singer.

His criticism came to the notice of the authorities and he was sentenced to an eight- year term in a labour camp. After his release he worked as a maths teacher and began to write.

The novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich first appeared in Russian in the literary magazine Novy Mir in , reportedly only after Khrushchev had given his permission for it to do so, and it was published in an English translation the following year. The book does exactly what its title suggests. It chronicles one day in the life of an inmate of a Soviet prison camp.

With its simple, unadorned language and the obvious authenticity of its descriptions of life in the camps of the Gulag, the book caused a sensation both in the Soviet Union and abroad. By the mid-sixties, his work was appearing only in samizdat publications and, in the mid-seventies, the writer went into an exile in the West that lasted twenty years. His later work was more epic in scale but, arguably, nothing Solzhenitsyn wrote subsequently had the same direct impact on readers as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

It is a short book but one that has much to say about human nature stripped to its basics. His greatest achievement has been to use the style and format of the comic book to tackle a subject that most people would have assumed to be beyond the reach of the genre — the Holocaust. Drawing on the recollections of his parents and their experiences as Polish Jews of Nazi persecution, Spiegelman spent nearly twenty years developing and refining the graphic work which, in effect, told their tale.

Maus began its existence as a few strips in an underground comic and eventually became a long, two-volume masterpiece. The characters in the comic are anthropomorphically portrayed as animals. Jews are mice, Germans are cats. Other creatures represent other nationalities. Maus has had its critics — some people are queasy with his use of animals to depict ethnic and national groups, feeling that it is uncomfortably close to the ways in which Jews were shown in Nazi propaganda — but it has proved an inspirational work of art to others.

His book ultimately transcends the genre in which it was created and becomes an immensely powerful and uplifting tale of persecution, suffering and survival. Out of this experience came Walden. He emphasises the quasi-religious properties of a communion with nature but he also describes his domestic economy, his agricultural experi- ments and his observations of flora and fauna with great precision. Sometimes doing so might lead one into difficulties, even into direct opposition to authority.

Society for Thoreau was important but it was not so important as the freedom of the individual. In the final analysis, a man could not surrender to the wishes of the majority his own freedom to act as his own conscience and inner self told him he should. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The results of that study were not only academic works like the standard edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but also the vast, three-volume saga entitled The Lord of the Rings. Set in the fantasy lands of Middle-earth, and peopled by an array of men, hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and other races, The Lord of the Rings chronicles the struggle for possession of the One Ring and its powers and the ongoing confrontation between the forces of good and the forces of evil in Middle-earth.

In the fifty years since the books appeared, many other authors have followed in his path and written epic works of fantasy but Tolkien outclasses all his imitators. He does so not so much because of his plot the simple and morally explicit battle between good and evil is easy to replicate as thanks to his teeming imagination.

Drawing on his own encyclopaedic knowledge of such subjects as Norse mythology, Anglo-Saxon literature and medieval philology, he gave his made-up worlds complete systems of language, history, anthropology and geography.

Reading him is like exploring an entire library — his invention seems inexhaustible. There seems little reason to suppose that this verdict will change in any future public votes. As he grew older Tolstoy became increasingly disenchanted with the books he had written and, indeed, with the whole notion of fiction. He was drawn into a profound moral struggle in which he began to look upon his life so far, and his earlier writings, as empty and meaningless.

A dozen years later, Tolstoy published The Kingdom of God is Within You, a summation of the Christian ideas in which he came to believe. His ethical writings, including The Kingdom of God Is Within You, revolve around a belief in the overwhelming importance of love towards both God and humanity as a moral principle. Evil, in this view, was not to be directly resisted, private property was to be renounced and governments and churches, which stifled the soul, were to be abolished.

His religious credo in his final years had little to do with established religions. He is variously said to have been born as a old man with a grey beard, after sixty-two years in the womb, to have lived for nine hundred and ninety years and to have owed his conception to his mother looking at a falling star.

Whether Lao Tzu was a historical figure or a legendary one matters less than that the writings attributed to him have long had a central place in Chinese culture and that they continue to provide inspiration and meaning in the lives of millions of readers around the world today.

The path, however, is not necessarily easy to pick out. The Tao Te Ching is an enigmatic guide. Only by study and meditation on the paradoxes and ambiguities of the Tao Te Ching can its multiple meanings be understood. For those in search of an easy road to enlightenment, this classic of Chinese literature and philosophy is not recommended; for those prepared to work towards right living and right thinking, its subtleties repay regular reading.

Probably written six centuries before the time of Christ, it was translated into French by a Jesuit priest in the eighteenth century but the first English version did not appear until Since its publication in the West, its value has always been recognised.

Generals from Napoleon to Douglas MacArthur have drawn upon the wisdom it contains. Modern business leaders, politicians, chess players and football managers have all found the lessons it inculcates of value. Even fictional mafiosi find it of interest. Originally devised during a period of almost non-stop warfare between rival Chinese states, the ideas expressed in The Art of War have proved adaptable to changing circumstances over the ensuing centuries.

The author of The Art of War was a near contemporary of Confucius but, like the great Chinese philosopher-statesman, his work still speaks to people living in societies utterly unlike the one in which it was written.

It can offer insights on life to those who have never set foot on a battlefield and to those who are never likely to find themselves, like Tony Soprano, at the head of an organised crime family. Captured by the Germans, he was present in Dresden in February when the city was firebombed by the Allies and tens of thousands lost their lives. Vonnegut survived but the bombing of the city scarred him for the rest of his life. In some sense, all his later writing can be seen as a response to the destruction of Dresden and as an attempt to explain his own chance survival but Slaughterhouse-Five, in particular, takes the facts of his life and transforms them into remarkable fiction.

His life does not unfold for him in chrono- logical order but moves randomly back and forth along its timeline. What is more, he is in contact with aliens from a planet named Trafalmadore. Indeed, he is at one point kidnapped by the Trafalmadorians who exhibit him in a zoo and expect him to mate with a porn actress.

Nonetheless it is through his contact with the Trafalmadorians that Billy comes to terms with his life and gains some sense of peace. The aliens see the universe in four dimensions — the fourth being time — and thus know everything about their lives in advance. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. In the s she became an activist in the Civil Rights movement and later worked as a journalist and editor. She has published many collections of her poetry and her fiction includes The Third Life of Grange Copeland, set in the rural Georgia in which she grew up, Meridian, the story of a young black woman active in the Civil Rights movement of the s, and Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel which explores the consequences of female circumcision, a practice which Walker has also outspokenly condemned in non-fiction writings.

The book tells the story of Celie, a young black girl in the American Deep South, who suffers poverty, rape and the terrors of a violent marriage. Only when she meets the glamorous singer Shug Avery is she able to break out of the trap her life has become and find the love and fulfilment she has always been denied.

Told through a series of diary entries and letters and notable for its eloquent use of black American vernacular, The Color Purple is a remarkable and inspiring book. Its title comes from a conversation between Celie and Shug about God. In his fiction since then — in novels like The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony — White has charted the trajectory of a generation of gay men from the joyful promiscuity of the pre-AIDS era to the more sombre realities of lives overshadowed by the threat of death and disease.

His increasing awareness of his own homosexuality brings with it complicated feelings of desire and shame. Both his parents are aloof and unloving and he yearns for an affection and an intimacy that are denied him. Only in the consolations of art and literature and in a sexual relationship with another, younger teenage boy, graphically but tenderly described in the novel, does he achieve some sense of what he is and what he might become.

He was born into a Hasidic family in the Romanian town of Sighet and was a teenager when almost the entire Jewish population of the town was deported to Auschwitz. After the war he lived first in France where he studied at the Sorbonne and later worked as a journalist and then in the USA where he began to publish the fiction and non-fiction for which he is famous and to lecture on the Holocaust.

For more than fifty years, Wiesel has been indefatigable in his efforts to ensure that the terrible experiences of millions of Jews at the hands of the Nazis should not be forgotten. In her teens she rebelled against this destiny, openly acknowledged her lesbianism and left home.

In the years since then she has written a number of other novels ranging from works that mix elements of historical fiction and the magic realist novel The Passion and Sexing the Cherry to books like The Powerbook which play with ideas of time and cyberspace. She has also written fiction recently Tanglewreck and The Stone Gods, for instance aimed primarily at children. The central character, Jeanette, is adopted and, like her creator, grows up believing that she has a special destiny as a preacher and a missionary.

She accepts this until, in her teens, she falls for another young woman and chooses love and sexuality over the demands of religion and family. However, there is much more going on in the book than simply a fictional remoulding of autobiographical experience.

The novel is a rich celebration of diversity and difference. There were friends and there were enemies. In the world that Jeanette chooses, it is mixed feelings rather than narrow certainties that are to be applauded. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. Women, made insecure by the images presented in the media and in advertising, collaborate in the maintenance of this subordination but Wolf provides the ammunition in her book to destroy the beauty myth.

Her most recent book, The End of America, raises her deep concerns that civil liberties are at risk in contemporary America and that the Bush administration has introduced and endorsed policies which have parallels in the rise to power of totalitarian regimes.

However, none of her work has had quite the impact that her first book had. At a time when the number of anorexic and bulimic women is increasing, when cosmetic surgeons are finding that more and more women, dissatisfied with their own bodies, are willing to pay to go under the knife, when the diet industry makes billions worldwide, the message Wolf wished to convey in seems just as apposite in She is acknowledged as one of the most rewarding and innovative novelists of her time.

In works like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves she revealed her fascination with individual psychology, using often avant-garde techniques of narration to reveal the internal lives of her characters. This book is an attempt to coax Roman history closer to the bone, to the breath and matter of the living being.

Drawing from a remarkable array of ancient and modern sources, Carlin Barton offers the most complex understanding to date of the emotional and spiritual life of the ancient Romans. Her provocative and original inquiry focuses on the sentiments of honor that shaped the Romans' sense of themselves and their society. Speaking directly to the concerns and curiosities of the contemporary reader, Barton brings Roman society to life, elucidating the complex relation between the inner life of its citizens and its social fabric.

Though thoroughly grounded in the ancient writings--especially the work of Seneca, Cicero, and Livy--this book also draws from contemporary theories of the self and social theory to deepen our understanding of ancient Rome.

Barton explores the relation between inner desires and social behavior through an evocative analysis of the operation, in Roman society, of contests and ordeals, acts of supplication and confession, and the sense of shame. As she fleshes out Roman physical and psychological life, she particularly sheds new light on the consequential transition from republic to empire as a watershed of Roman social relations. Barton's ability to build productively on both old and new scholarship on Roman history, society, and culture and her imaginative use of a wide range of work in such fields as anthropology, sociology, psychology, modern history, and popular culture will make this book appealing for readers interested in many subjects.

This beautifully written work not only generates insight into Roman history, but also uses that insight to bring us to a new understanding of ourselves, our modern codes of honor, and why it is that we think and act the way we do.

Fantasy is one of the most visible genres in popular culture - we see the creation of magical and imagined worlds and characters in every type of media, with very strong fan bases in tow.

If you want to expand your range of reading or deepen your understanding of this genre, this is the best place to start. Willie Stark's obsession with political power leads to the ultimate corruption of his gubernatorial administration. In this epic novel, a poor student in St. Petersburg makes the fateful decision to rob and kill an elderly pawnbroker for her money. The work that made Fyodor Dostoevsky one of the greats, Crime and Punishment remains a hallmark study of greed, morality, and the dangers of radicalism.

Lying on his deathbed, corrupt soldier and politician Artemio Cruz is surrounded by family and a priest as they attempt to coax him into confessing his betrayals and crooked dealings. Are you craving more short story collections like Diary of a Madman and Other Stories? You can get your fill in this post that has 21 of the best short story collections.

Anne Frank was 13 years old when she and her family went in hiding. Kennedy once said: "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank. Considered one of the greatest works in the pantheon of world literature, Don Quixote follows the ill-fated adventures of Alonso Quixano: a middle-aged man who loses his sanity and believes himself to be one of the knights in shining armor he has read about in chivalric books.

A small band of friends must stop Count Dracula from coming to England and spreading the curse of the undead all over the continent. Published in , Dracula boasts the original vampire and lastingly re-defined gothic fantasy. In Regency England, a young woman named Emma Woodhouse is determined to matchmake the friends around her. Hijinks and plenty of revelations of the heart ensue.

Of her titular character, Jane Austen wrote, "I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like. The grandfather of monster fiction, Frankenstein has fanned the imaginations of horror and suspense lovers around the world. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.

When Nick Carraway settles down in decadent s New York for a summer, he has no idea what awaits him in the booming parties, Daisy Buchanan, and the mysterious figure at the center of it all, Jay Gatsby. In The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald has crafted a masterwork for the ages and a haunting contemplation of the American Dream. Often said to be Disney for grown-ups. Beware: Grimm's Fairy Tales are much crueler and cruder than the stories that most children know.

Gulliver's Travels is one of the bestselling parodies of all time for a reason. Who is Hamlet, Prince of Denmark — and is he truly seeing the ghost of his father or is he going mad? In this terrifying vision of the future, Margaret Atwood imagines a society governed by gender discrimination. Follow eleven-year-old Harry, Ron, and Hermione as they grow up, study magic, and learn how to defeat the Dark Lord — and try to make it out alive.

Have you read Harry Potter and you're not sated yet? Don't forget to check out these 20 great books like Harry Potter. A grim masterpiece that catapulted Joseph Conrad among the ranks of the great writers. Arthur Dent is the only man who survived the destruction of Earth. Bilbo Baggins only wanted a peaceful dinner party. Stanley Yelnats is that unlucky boy who gets sent to Camp Green Lake: a Texan juvenile corrections facility where boys dig holes all day in a dried-up lake.

An ingenious, one-of-a-kind novel — literally. The story of Horacio Oliveira, a well-read bohemian, is divided into chapters that can be read in multiple orders: sequentially or by following the suggested reading guide, which prompts readers to jump around various chapters and makes 99 of the chapters expendable.

Having been born into an age of heroes and warriors, Homer created a work of art that was deserving of them. Relive the fall of Troy and the glory of Achilles in this epic poem that has survived for a couple thousand years and counting. Invisible Man is key part of American literature that probingly examines racism, black identity, and why some are more invisible in society than others.

This landmark novel that re-defined narrative consciousness centers on the eponymous Jane Eyre , an orphan born in s England. As Jane grows up, she takes her destiny into her own hands — which becomes particularly poignant when she meets the brooding Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Hall. This definitive science fiction novel shares the story of Otto Lidenbrock: a professor who ventures to nowhere else but the center of the Earth with his nephew Axel, and Hans, a guide.

Lions, witches, talking fauns, and Turkish delights — oh my! Not many stories are as unanimously beloved as this short one by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The four March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy — grow up and come of age in this seminal work of family drama. They might be women, but they are by no means little in the halls of great literature. Lolita is dark, sardonic, and ultimately genius study of madness and unreliability.

No author casts a greater shadow over one genre quite like J. Tolkien and epic fantasy. But what happens when Florentino never forgets about Fermina — and decides to make his intentions known again after fifty years of separation?

Love in the Time of Cholera is a towering magical realist classic. Who is Madame Bovary? What would you do if you wake up one morning and discover that you are now an insect?

Franz Kafka answers this burning question in this short novel, regarded by many as a master stroke of genius. Man faces off against white whale in this page story that remains one of the grandest works about morality and the nature of obsession. A must-read, and not just for the adventure. Clarissa Dalloway said that she would buy the flowers herself, or so begins Mrs Dalloway. Looking for more books by the Mistress of Mystery? We've got you covered with the 10 best Agatha Christie books.

But all might be lost when they move to a new farm — even each other. This is Steinbeck at his peak in this heart-wrenching story about friendship and loss. And he didn't just write one amazing book — head to our guide to the 15 best John Steinbeck books to discover more!

In this short novel, Santiago is an old fisherman who one day happens upon a marlin that might be able to make him rich. Young Oliver Twist is an orphaned boy living on the streets when he escapes to London in the s. Gabriel Garcia Marquez covers seven generations of one family while exploring themes of fatalism, subjectivity, death, and time in a world where magical elements combine seamlessly with real life.

One of the most important works in Spanish literature and a landmark of magical realism in its own right. You might vaguely know the gist of the story behind One Thousand and One Arabian Nights , but have you ever actually read it before? This is the must-read translation, as new bride Scheherazade must wittily come up with new tales to escape her execution night after night.

Adela Quested is to be engaged to Ronny Moore in Chandrapore, which necessitates a journey to India in the s. This novel, regarded as one of the must-read books of the twentieth century, was instrumental in launching a postcolonial discourse against the backdrop of the Indian independence movement. In the town of Comala, where ghosts are indistinguishable from the living, young Juan Preciado goes to look for his estranged father. From the mind of Norton Juster comes a magical journey.

The Phantom Tollbooth is a classic children's fantasy. Freckled, red-haired, and nine-years old, Pippi also happens to be the strongest girl in the world: she can lift a horse with one hand.