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Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
A self-made man in a Nigerian village loses everything in the wake of colonialism.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim.
A junior lecturer at a British college tries to hang on to his job while dealing with a scatterbrained boss and a passion for the girlfriend of his boss’s son.

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
In a future society where women’s rights are restricted, a lower class of women are forced into servitude as breeders for the upper-class Wives.

Saul Bellow, Herzog.
A man whose life is falling apart responds to his personal crisis by writing unsent letters to friends, enemies, colleagues, and famous people.

Thomas Berger, Little Big Man.
A man with two fathers—one white and one Cheyenne—lives in two cultures but belongs to neither.

Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls.
On the eve of World War I, three girls bury a box on the coast of England and are reunited 50 years later by a mysterious classified ad.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
A man becomes intrigued by his neighbor—a free-spirited young woman named Holly Golightly.

E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime.
In 1906, a ragtime musician lashes out against racism and sets in motion a chain of events that affects the members of an affluent family as well as notable figures of the time.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
An African-American man expelled from college for revealing unpleasant truths struggles for a place in a society where he feels invisible.

Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain.
A wounded Confederate soldier makes the long journey home to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where his sweetheart is struggling to maintain her farm.

Ernest Gaines, A Lesson before Dying.
A teacher returns to his Louisiana hometown in the 1940s and is asked to help a wrongly convicted death row inmate die with dignity.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
The rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo seen through the eyes of one family.

Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer.
English children on holiday in France are left on their own when their mother becomes ill and are helped by a charming man at their hotel, but their summer idyll is broken by jealousy.

William Golding, Lord of the Flies.
A group of schoolboys stranded on a desert island after a plane crash begin to revert to savagery.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22.
A satirical tale of an airman in World War II who is determined to stay alive in an inescapable situation.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea.
An old Cuban fisherman down on his luck engages in a relentless, agonizing battle to catch a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner.
A successful writer returns to his homeland of Afghanistan to rescue the son of his childhood friend whom he once betrayed.

John Irving, The World According to Garp.
Conceived in bizarre circumstances by a nurse and a dying soldier, Garp grows up to be a novelist while his mother becomes a feminist icon.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day.
A perfect English butler reflects on his three decades of service, his loyalty to his employer, and his feelings for a housekeeper he worked with.

Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country.
At an isolated mountain hot-spring in Japan, a wealthy man engages in an affair with a geisha, who knows their passion cannot last.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road.
A writer holed up in a room at his aunt's house gets inspired to hit the road and see America.

Ken Kesey, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The inmates of a mental institution are inspired by the arrival of a free-spirited new patient who challenges a domineering nurse.

Daniel Keyes, Flowers for Algernon.
A man with an IQ of 68 volunteers for an experimental brain operation that worked on a mouse named Algernon.

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird.
The explosion of racial hatred in an Alabama town in the 1930s is viewed by a girl whose father defends a black man accused of raping a white woman.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses.
A 16-year-old boy leaves his Texas home and rides with a friend to Mexico, where he has a variety of adventures and an ill-fated romance.

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove.
A portrait of dusty little Texas town inhabited by an unforgettable assortment of heroes and outlaws, whores and ladies, Indians and settlers.

Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk.
This first volume in the Cairo Trilogy describes the disintegrating family life of a tyrannical, prosperous merchant, his timid wife and their rebellious children in post-World War I Egypt.

Toni Morrison, Beloved.
A former slave is haunted by the ghost of her dead child and by a terrible past.

Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea.
A man retires from the theatre and leaves London for a home by the sea where he intends to write his memoirs, but he finds his plans disrupted.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.
A Russian émigré precariously employed at an American college in the 1950s struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings.

V. S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas.
A man who yearns to buy a home of his own tries to break free of his wife’s domineering family.

Joyce Carol Oates, them.
The chronicle of an American family on the outskirts of society living in the slums of Detroit.

Patrick O’Brian, Master & Commander.
Captain Jack Aubrey invites Stephen Maturin to be the ship’s surgeon on his new command the Sophie on patrol in the Mediterranean.

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried.
The members of a platoon in Vietnam battle the enemy, loneliness, fear, and each other.

Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge.
A collection of stories dealing with race, faith, and morality that encompass the comic and the tragic.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar.
A brilliant college student wins a plum assignment with a New York fashion magazine but finds herself spiraling into a dark depression.

Chaim Potok, The Chosen.
Two Jewish boys—one Modern Orthodox and one Hasidic—form an unlikely friendship in 1940s Brooklyn.

J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye.
Expelled from prep school and disillusioned by the phoniness of the adult world, Holden Caulfield avoids going home and wanders around New York.

Nevil Shute, On the Beach.
After a nuclear war, a group of people in Australia live out their final days while awaiting the arrival of the fallout that will doom them all.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
An account of a typical, grueling day in the life of a man imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp.

Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
An unconventional teacher at a girls’ school attracts a coterie of favorites but when she is fired she becomes convinced that one betrayed her.

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird.
A retired literary agent and his wife read a journal he kept during a trip 20 years ago, bringing unresolved emotional issues to light.

William Styron, Sophie’s Choice.
A Southerner who heads to New York to become a writer becomes emotionally entangled with his neighbors—a brilliant Jewish man and a Polish woman with a tragic secret.

Gail Tsukiyama, The Samurai’s Garden.
A Chinese man sent to Japan to recover from tuberculosis gets involved in the lives of the locals.

John Updike, Rabbit, Run.
A former high-school athletic star who is disillusioned with his present life flees from his wife and child in a futile search for grace and order.

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter-house Five.
Billy Pilgrim, a former POW who witnessed the fireboming of Dresden, becomes unstuck in time when he is abducted by aliens.

Alice Walker, The Color Purple.
Two sisters—one a missionary in Africa and the other trapped in an unhappy marriage—share their experiences through a 30-year correspondence.

William Wharton, Birdy.
A young man who grew up in a bleak and violent Philadelphia neighborhood becomes obsessed with birds and dreams of flight.