Perhaps one of the most original works of literature in any language, its translation is as impressive as Perec's French original (La Disparition in French). Why? Because both versions are completely without the letter 'e'.
Anton Vowl (geddit?) is missing and it's down to his friends to find him. Has he been murdered? Kidnapped? Or has he fallen victim to some dark accident? As they are led through a labyrinth of clues, dead bodies, forbidden passions and an ancient curse, we are asked to question how we fill the existential void that can too easily creep into any of our lives. Soon, they too begin to fall foul of whatever dark force swept him off.
It is a staggering work of creative genius by a writer that the Italian writer Italo Calvino said "bears absolutely no resemblance to anyone else". Even Perec himself told an interviewer not long before his death that he never wrote the same thing twice (he composed A Man Asleep almost entirely from sentences written by other authors). Revel in its E-less beauty.
When accepting her Nobel Prize in 1993, Morrison said, "We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." Nowhere is this more viscerally true than in Sula .
Nel and Sula are two poor African-American girls who meet in small-town Ohio in the 1920s. Their souls bound together "because each had discovered years before they were neither white nor male and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them they set about something else to be." But as they grow, their paths diverge: Nel gets married and Sula runs away to follow her dreams. Only, when she returns a decade later, everything has changed.
Not only does it contain one of modern literature's most mythical characters – the courageously unapologetic Sula – the novel covers themes of friendship, identity, betrayal and forgiveness with such depth and clarity that anyone with even a crumb of life experience will wonder how Morrison so easily found her way into their heart.
There are two kinds of people: those who have read Ulysses , and those who have not. If you are the latter, then this is the book to read in your 30s. It's a tough read, so some degree of literary maturity generally helps. But stick with it, and you will get from it 10 times what you put in.
Joyce's friend T.S. Eliot would hail the modernist masterpiece as "the most important expression which the present age has found," before sandblasting those who dared call it too complicated with the words, "The next generation is responsible for its own soul; a man of genius is responsible to his peers, not to a studio full of uneducated and undisciplined coxcombs."
It is one of the greatest works of literature in English – funny, profound, grotesque – a carnival of life and a must read for anyone who interested in the magic of the written word.
To The Lighthouse opens with a large family – the Ramsays – spending a summer on the Isle of Skye, as the world outside teeters on the edge of the First World War. Mrs Ramsay is a beautiful and charming, a mysterious beacon of maternal instinct. Her husband is an introverted intellectual and something of an emotional dud. Family friends come and go, they return home, the war happens, the house lies dormant... until they return 10 years later.
It's a simple plot, short and tight, that reveals far more about what it means to be human than its size should ever allow. That's Woolf's genius. Few novels cut through the clutter of family life and gender conflict with more delicate precision.
What we learn, through Woolf's near-musical prose ("He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams"), is a fundamental human truth: that, as time passes, things fade – people, relationships, hopes, dreams. But what transcends are the "little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark". "Some books," as Margaret Atwood said of it, "have to wait until you're ready for them." This is one of them.
'Anyone who devotes their life to fighting society in order to be free must be pretty sincere about suffering' - Sayaka Murata
Keiko Furukura is a 36-year-old misfit who is endlessly baffled by human behaviour. For 18 years she's worked in a convenience store – ironically named Smile Mart – a dead-end drudge of a job whose sole fulfilment is that it provides a window through which she can observe other people and think about life, love and what 'normal' really means.
Keiko's family worry about her. They want her to find purpose, or better, a husband. So she strikes a deal with a similarly weird male colleague in search of a wife to finance him, so he can hide from the world. She agrees to have him stay with her, where she'll bring home his bacon, and in return he'll help her give the outward impression that she is, in fact, normal.
It is a quirky, dreamy story that truly lingers – a huge hit in Japan and across the world upon its release, winning Murata the Akutagawa Prize for fiction (Japan's equivalent to the Booker). Perfect for anyone who feels they don't quite fit society's mould.
"Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know." So goes one of the most haunting opening lines in literature. They are Mersault's words, Camus' messed-up protagonist, a wonderfully unlikeable social misfit who struggles to conform to society's whims. Upon losing his mother, he descends deeper down a tunnel of madness and criminality, culminating in the murder of a stranger on a beach for no good reason.
The message? Existence is a tough nut to crack. Human psychology is a tangled mess. We are who we are, so why not just be?
The book is open to many interpretations – Camus wanted it to be ambiguous. But while on the surface it seems bleak in outlook, at its heart it presents a man who rejects the pressure to fit in, and focuses on loving life part by tiny part. Mersault loves swimming in the sea and describes his meals with the relish of a TV chef.
And there it asks another question: if Mersault hadn't stumbled across the person on the beach with that gun, how might his life have panned out? As he says, "If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there."
Sexuality, identity, and independence are the meat of this literary feast of feminist observation. A trailblazing work upon publication, De Beauvoir scandalised the mid-century establishment, blowing open a case for female freedom with the force of a gunshot.
The Vatican placed it on its Index of Forbidden Books, as stuffy critics of the time foamed over De Beauvoir's suggestion that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Later, she said it was her attempt to explain "why a woman's situation, still, even today, prevents her from exploring the world's basic problems."
Today, it is considered as relevant a takedown of the patriarchal values that trickle through time as anything written since. "What a curse to be a woman!" Beauvoir writes. "And yet the very worst curse when one is a woman is, in fact, not to understand that it is one." Essential reading for any woman – or man for that matter – entering that time in life where one wants to get to know oneself properly.
This is a gorgeous, sweeping inter-generational story that manages to encapsulate all of the sticky, difficult things about settling down into one corner of Brooklyn. It follows a group of former bandmates from the 1980s trying to navigate their relationships and grapple with growing older as time slowly robs them of their hipster youth.
Long-married Andrew and Elizabeth (a drifting soul and an estate agent, respectively) now have a teenage son called Henry, while Zoe and Jane – now restauranteurs – have a daughter called Ruby. Soon, Henry and Ruby fall for each other and get up to all sorts of trouble.
As the narrative unfolds across one momentous summer, each character (all splendidly drawn) must confront their own set of issues around family, love and the loss of youth. It is a novel doused in feeling that burns with wit. "With its sunny cover," the Pulitzer-winning critic Michiko Kakutani wrote when it came out in 2016, "it looks like designated vacation reading — but it’s just too deftly and thoughtfully written to be relegated merely to the beach."
Anne Tyler is a pleasure to read at any age. But the Accidental Tourist is best savoured at a stage in life when things are a little more in place.
It follows Macon, a bereaved travel writer who hates travel, struggling with a disintegrating marriage. He is also a man addicted to routine and terrified of change. When his wife finally calls it a day, he descends into abject misanthropy as he searches for a semblance of normal life. Then he meets Muriel, a garrulous dog-trainer who opens his world to the simple joys that can be found in everyday existence.
Tyler is one of literature's greatest family portrait artists, who tiptoes through themes of love, loss and change with quiet certainty. "I'm beginning to think that maybe it's not just how much you love someone," she writes. "Maybe what matters is who you are when you're with them."
Ludo is a boy of omnivorous curiosity. Brought up in poverty by his mother, Sybilla, in a tumbledown London flat, he devours information as if every nugget has a sell-by date. He learned ancient Greek, Japanese and Arabic from the age of four and reads Homer – in its original form – on the Tube (which the pair ride for hours in the winter because they can't afford heating at home).
There's no dad around, so he watches the Kurosawa classic The Seven Samurai on repeat – his mum's idea to give him a male role model (or seven). And yet, the one thing he really wants is that Sybilla will not give him: the name of his father. So one day, age 11, he sets out on his own odyssey to find his Last Samurai – the dad he never knew.
When disappointment inevitably follows, Ludo embarks on a grander quest – not just for a surrogate father figure but for a "meaningful wholeness" to his existence. What grows from this is a funny, warm and poignant inquiry into the limitations of genius and how to reconcile what we know with who we are to live a good life.
'Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future'
"Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future." That's the sort of hard-won wisdom that can be found in the pages of Mitchell's wondrous novel that spans time, place and genre. It melds philosophy, history, culture and politics, with no small amount of Mitchell's considerable imagination devoted to the mysteries of the human heart.
As captivating as it is complex, it tells six separate stories that carry the reader from the mid-19th century Pacific Islands to 1970s California to a dystopian future police state where clones are grown in vats.
The stories may be separate, but they fit together like a stack of perfectly proportioned Russian Dolls, as Mitchell gradually and deftly reveals how his characters connect and their fates intermingle. Perceptions of reality and identity are the game in this puzzle of a book that quivers with ideas, big and small. "My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean," says one character. "Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?"
Photograph at top: Stuart Simpson/Penguin
