They don't write 'em like this any more! From Great Expectations to The Great Gatsby, lose yourself in these masterpieces...

Maybe you’ve never had the time, or perhaps studying some of them at school put you off, but there has never been a better chance to tackle the classics by the world’s greatest authors. 

With memorable characters, meaty themes and, most important of all, beautiful writing, there are plenty of reasons why these books have entranced generations. 

So discover for yourself the utter joy of being transported to another world…

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was adapted for a 2013 film by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (who is pictured above) and Carey Mulligan

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was adapted for a 2013 film by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio (who is pictured above) and Carey Mulligan

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

If lockdown puts you in the mood to take some time out with the kind of plus-sized masterpiece that the everyday nine-to-five grind rarely leaves room for, where better to begin than with this 17th-century Spanish epic?

The first ever novel is about a down-at-heel country gent who, hopped up on tales of knightly derring-do, dubs himself Don Quixote and sets off a-roaming on a series of muddle-headed escapades with his loyal sidekick Sancho Panza.

A charming comic caper that doubles as a poignant case study in wild self-delusion.

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

There has been a spike of interest in Defoe’s startling 1722 novel A Journal Of The Plague Year, but if that seems just a little on the nose right now, you could do worse than take a few tips from Robinson Crusoe, English literature’s number one self-isolator.

Shipwrecked on a remote Caribbean island with only a dog and two cats for company, the Yorkshire sailor’s chatty, thoughtful reflections on morality, the meaning of life and the virtues of perseverance remain engaging and endearing.

Stick with it and there’s a high dose of drama, too, in the shape of cannibals and mutineers.

Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride And Prejudice by Jane Austen

While a list such as this could rightly feature any or all of Austen’s six novels, Pride And Prejudice is undoubtedly the most iconic.

This is a shrewd and sparkling comedy about the choices on offer to well-to-do young Englishwomen of the early 19th century.

It’s the story of Elizabeth Bennet, a landowner’s daughter who shuns her family’s strictures on marrying for advantage in favour of a love match with the one and only Mr Darcy. Who also happens to be very wealthy with a stunning stately home…

It’s subtle, supremely readable and bloody funny to boot — just the tonic we need right now.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was miraculously still in her teens when she wrote this spine-tingling tale as her entry in a parlour game with the poets Lord Byron and her lover and future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. 

They competed to see who could concoct the scariest story.

It’s the cautionary tale of a young Swiss doctor, Victor Frankenstein, whose hunger to outdo the latest cutting-edge science gets catastrophically out of hand — as witnessed by an Arctic explorer, Robert Walton, who sees the result running amok in the wild.

All the meatiest questions about humanity and the limits of technological progress are asked in this, the first science- fiction novel.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The only novel published by the most mythologised of the Bronte sisters, this Gothic melodrama shocked and baffled Victorian readers but has inspired cult-like devotion ever since — not to mention a chart-topping single by Kate Bush.

Named after the Yorkshire manor house at its heart, it’s a tangled tale turning on the incestuous passion between a gruff, brooding landlord, Heathcliff, and his foster sister Catherine, whose decision to marry for status, not love, sets off a thunderous chain reaction felt through the decades.

It’s an unruly cocktail of ghostly goings-on, savage violence and shivery romance.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Published in France in 1856, this is the tragic story of the original desperate housewife, Emma, who lands herself in hot water after doing the dirty on her husband, a hapless country doctor who fails to live up to her Prince Charming ideals.

Beautifully written, the book’s almost wicked genius lies in its coolly impassive narration, which leaves us unsure what Flaubert himself thinks about the characters (his refusal to pass explicit judgment on Emma landed him with a charge of obscenity).

Every time I read this novel I see it anew — it’s viciously satirical but also achingly tender.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

While the heyday of Victorian serialisation meant that Dickens wrote any number of great novels perfect for whiling away these quarantined days, many of them (whisper it) do carry a fair bit of timber.

Sleeker than his usual fare is this 1861 rites-of-passage book about an orphan who finds himself within touching distance of his dream of becoming a gentleman, thanks to a windfall from an unexpected source that is not wholly welcome.

Tonally wild, and full of light as well as brutal darkness, it’s a twisty tragicomedy that teaches you to reconsider what really matters in life.

Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Published in Russian in 1866, this is the tale of impoverished former law student, Raskolnikov, who lives in St Petersburg.

He fools himself into thinking that he’s above the law when he reckons that he can solve his money worries, and maybe even do some good in the world, by murdering a predatory old pawnbroker. 

Naturally the guilt-racked reality fails to live up to the plan in his head.

I’ll always remember the cold sweat in which I first read this darkly philosophical crime story about free will, redemption and God — I was utterly gripped by its dream-like ambience of mounting dread.

War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy

War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy

War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Of all the big beasts that are more talked about than read, this one is perhaps the biggest.

Set in Russia amid the Napoleonic Wars, and portraying everything from St Petersburg high society to the bloodshed of Borodino, it tells the story — among many others — of Pierre Bezukhov, an aristocrat’s illegitimate son, and Natasha, a count’s daughter.

Packed with duels, high-stakes card games and elopements, it mixes scalding drama with essayistic digression, and is populated by characters who feel as real (and as maddening) as your own family.

If you weren’t inspired to try it when Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation aired in 2016, now’s the time.

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Widely regarded as the finest English novel ever written, this rich social tapestry unfolds in the Midlands in the early 19th century.

It’s pegged to the stories of a go-getting young doctor, Lydgate, and 19-year-old Dorothea Brooke, who is eager to use her inheritance to make a difference in the world but is stuck in a stifling marriage to a dull older man. 

The almost impossibly wise narrative voice of Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) constantly pops up to remind us there’s another side to the story whenever she finds herself getting too cosy with any one character.

Tess Of The D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

This 1891 masterpiece follows a downtrodden milkmaid pressured by her peasant family to search for extra work following an accident that leaves them in danger of destitution.

When Tess falls in with a rich playboy, Alec, she gets the income she needs, but at a terrible cost — not least to her doomed relationship with another man who piously takes the view that she’s damaged goods.

Hotly disputed in its day, this stinging broadside against the double standards of Victorian morality is terrifically, almost horribly, dramatic. 

Even just thinking about Tess’s fate feels too much to bear.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

Conrad, who was born in Poland and wrote some of the greatest novels to be found in English, drew on his seafaring days for this morality tale published in 1900.

It’s the confession of a sailor who decides to save himself rather than the hundreds of passengers below deck when his steamship starts letting in water.

While the passengers are saved, it’s no thanks to him, and the guilt is ruinous.

Emerging through a nest of narrative layers designed to complicate simplistic notions of truth, this is a provocative examination of shame, salvation and British identity at the height of the Empire.

In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

This is made up of 3,000 pages, containing hundreds of characters and more than one million words — most of them written in bed in a cork-lined room.

French writer Proust’s seven-volume mega-work (also known as Remembrance Of Things Past in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s landmark translation) follows a narrator who, dunking his cake in a cup of tea, finds himself flooded with nostalgic memories of the ins and outs of aristocratic life in Belle Epoque France.

Push past the slowish start and his reminiscences become an addiction you won’t want to shake, but if you get stuck, there’s always the 150-hour audiobook.

In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Ulysses by James Joyce

Ulysses by James Joyce

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

Fancy something shorter? 

Try Kafka’s 1915 story, perhaps the finest ever written, in which a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes to find himself turned into a cockroach and shunned by his family.

While Samsa’s nightmarish fate can be read as a skin-crawlingly apt symbol of all manner of psychological ills, from sexual anxiety to wage-slave ennui, the story’s timeless brilliance comes down to Kafka’s decision to play an entirely straight bat.

The scenario, thrillingly alive on its own terms, can bear almost any allegorical interpretation but doesn’t need one. 

Blackly funny, tragically moving: it’s perfect.

Ulysses by James Joyce

The best way to think of Joyce’s playful but daunting magnum opus, set over a summer’s day in 1904, is to see it as a pick’n’mix of freewheeling exercises in style.

Since many readers don’t get past the wordy initial chapters about a pompous teacher, Stephen Dedalus, why not skip to part four, which introduces the novel’s true hero, Leopold Bloom?

The joyous heart of the book consists of his random thoughts as he cooks breakfast, buys soap, pops to the post office… so don’t fret too much: it’s only the story of two blokes taking a stroll around Dublin.

Middlemarch by George Eliot: Widely regarded as the finest English novel ever written, this rich social tapestry unfolds in the Midlands in the early 19th century/ A film version is pictured above

Middlemarch by George Eliot: Widely regarded as the finest English novel ever written, this rich social tapestry unfolds in the Midlands in the early 19th century/ A film version is pictured above

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oozing Jazz Age glamour, this 1925 novel can seem to endorse the culture it sends up, but really it’s about the murky reality behind the glittering American Dream, prior to the Great Depression.

The ultimate story of lost illusions, it’s narrated by wide-eyed Nick Carraway. He is in awe of his multi-millionaire neighbour, the Gatsby of the title, who is a Long Island party host whose riches come from an uncertain source. Fitzgerald, unbelievably, first thought of naming the book Trimalchio In West Egg.

It was adapted for a 2013 film by Baz Luhrmann, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

‘A group of people plan to sail in a small boat to a lighthouse. At the end some of them reach the lighthouse in a small boat,’ ran one dismissive review of this Modernist gem. 

Well, yes, but Woolf, the most refined of English writers, always knew that a plot need not be at the centre of a novelist’s work.

This experimental family story, set before, during and after World War I in a Skye holiday house, toys ingeniously with how to portray the passing of time and the incommunicable nature of consciousness. 

Woolf wrestles with how each of us ultimately sees the world through our eyes only.

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

Newspeak, Big Brother, doublethink — few novels can have matched the reach of this genre-defining 1949 dystopia.

It’s set in a future Britain run by a totalitarian regime whose power hangs on the redefinition of language. We follow the pointedly named Winston, employed to churn out fake news by the Ministry of Truth.

Written at light-speed while Orwell was dying of tuberculosis, it remains incredibly fresh, luring you with crystal-clear prose into an austere nightmare world that’s both chilling and, in a very dark way, hilarious. Often imitated, but never bettered.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov created perhaps the most notorious of unreliable narrators in Humbert Humbert, a New England academic who cultivates a relationship with a widow to get closer to her 12-year-old daughter, Dolores, or Lolita.

A succes de scandale on publication in Paris in 1955, it’s subtler than you might expect if you know the book only by name — the Russian-American writer coaxes us into the narrator’s twisted world view before delivering a sucker punch that tests to breaking point the cosy notion that novels serve to generate empathy.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

No quarantine jokes please... Nobel prize-winner Marquez rewired expectations of literary fiction with this dizzying multi-generational saga, which follows one family through war, political turmoil and natural disasters in the invented town of Macondo.

The high watermark of magic realism, it defined an era of Latin American storytelling and got writers all over the world thinking big.

Marquez, who died in 2014, always refused offers to film the book, apparently telling Harvey Weinstein any movie would need to be released in two-minute instalments over 100 years. 

Now there’s a Netflix adaptation in the works, executive-produced by Marquez’s sons.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: While the heyday of Victorian serialisation meant that Dickens wrote any number of great novels perfect for whiling away these quarantined days, many of them (whisper it) do carry a fair bit of timber

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: While the heyday of Victorian serialisation meant that Dickens wrote any number of great novels perfect for whiling away these quarantined days, many of them (whisper it) do carry a fair bit of timber

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