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1984 (1949) by George Orwell: A dystopian novel set in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public manipulation by a totalitarian party and its leader, Big Brother. The novel tells the story of a party member who becomes disaffected and is prosecuted as a thought criminal by the repressive state apparatus.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) by Arthur C. Clarke: A science-fiction novel, written in parallel with the film of the same name directed by Stanley Kubrick. It narrates a voyage to Jupiter of a human crew with the sentient computer Hal after the discovery of a mysterious black monolith affecting human evolution.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll: A novel about a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic creatures.
The Ambassadors (1903) by Henry James: A novel that follows the trip of protagonist Lewis Lambert Strether to Europe in pursuit of Chad Newsome, his widowed fiancée’s supposedly wayward son. The third-person narrative is told exclusively from Strether’s point of view.
Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell: A political allegory about a farm where animals revolt against their human owners only to become enslaved and exploited by the pigs, who establish a new system as oppressive and tyrannical as the previous one.
Anna Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy: A Russian novel narrating the tragic story of a married aristocrat/socialite and her extramarital affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. It is regarded as one of the most accomplished realist novels.
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) by Jules Verne: An adventure novel narrating the story of the English aristocrat Phileas Fogg and his newly employed French valet Passepartout, as they attempt to circumnavigate the world in 80 days on a £20,000 wager set by his friends at the Reform Club.
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) by Alfred Döblin: A modernist novel narrating, through montage and multiple points of view, the story of Franz Biberkopf, a convicted murderer who comes out from prison and struggles to survive in the underworld of Berlin during the interwar years.
Bible: A collection of sacred texts or scriptures that Jews and Christians consider to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans. It contains texts from different authors and epochs, including narratives, songs, codes, chronicles, proverbs, letters, and other writings.
Blanquerna (ca. 1283) by Ramon Llull: A medieval novel chronicling the life of the eponymous hero, a nobleman who follows his religious vocation and is eventually elected as Pope. It is a major work of literature written in Catalan and one of the earliest predecessors of the modern European novel.
Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding: A novel written in the form of a personal diary chronicling a year in the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single working woman living in London.
The Brothers Karamazov (1879–1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A philosophical novel set in nineteenth-century Russia dealing with ethical debates about God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, judgment, and reason, set against a modernising Russia, with a plot that revolves around the subject of patricide.
