English Books Top 50

This book comes with an introduction and notes by Adam Roberts Royal Holloway, University of London. Homer's great epic describes the many adventures of Odysseus, Greek warrior, as he strives over many years to return to his home island of Ithaca after the Trojan War. His colourful adventures, his endurance, his love for his wife and son have the same power to move and inspire readers today as they did in Archaic Greece, 2800 years ago.

'White Nights' is one of Dostoevsky’s earlier short stories but one of his most enduringly popular. It tells the story of four nights in the life of the lonely narrator, who meets and falls in love with the mysterious and beautiful Nastenka.

Poor Folk was Dostoevsky’s first novel, written to try and alleviate his financial plight, and was a commercial success. It tells the story of Makar Devushkin, a clerk, and Varvara Dobroselova, a seamstress, by means of the letters they exchange; they are in love, but too poor to marry. Its exploration of humanitarian themes led to it being described as Russia’s first ‘social novel’.

By contrast, Dostoevsky’s second novel, The Double was not well received. First published in 1846, it was revised and republished by Dostoevsky in 1866, but he did not consider it a success. By contrast, Vladimir Nabokov called it 'the best thing he ever wrote’ and described it as ’a perfect work of art’.

Russia's literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman - a professor of black magic - arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital. But the Devil's mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master - a man who has turned his back on his former life and taken refuge in a lunatic asylum - and his past lover, Margarita. Both a satirical romp and a daring analysis of the nature of good and evil, innocence and guilt, The Master and Margarita is the crowning achievement of one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century.

The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, shocked the book's first readers, with even Emily's sister Charlotte wondering 'whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff'. Replete with unforgettable characters and situations that have seared themselves into our literary consciousness, Emily Brontë's intense masterpiece is one of the most haunting love stories in the canon of English literature.

Stories of the Serbian people are poetic, reflecting their proud heritage as Southern Slavs, who, in the years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, swept South, taking over the lands of the once great Ancient Greeks, the Latins and the Thracians.
Their folk tales echo the beautiful landscape and the intermingling with classic, heroic culture of the Byzantines. With a new introduction this powerful collection gathers together tales such as 'He Who Asks Little Receives Much', 'The Maiden Wiser Than the Tsar, 'The Biter Bit', 'Good Deeds Never Perish' and 'The Ram With the Golden Fleece'.