Big, bulky and bold
Wolf Hall, HilaryMantel
The first of Mantel’s evocative Thomas Cromwell novels: you watch as if via a camera mounted on his shoulder as this ambitious, clever man eases his way to power through Tudor society.
Middlemarch, George Eliot
What VirginiaWoolf praised as a rare “novel for grown-ups” is a large and masterly slice of early-Victorian life in middle England – politics, social conditions, culture and all – in which our heroine faces the choice of love over duty.
Life – A User’s Manual,
Georges Perec
The tale of a ludicrously rich Englishman who devises a pointless way of using his life (his method involves watercolours and jigsaws), this is a vast interlocking puzzle of stories involving the inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block. Slightly mad, entirely wonderful.
Bleak House, Charles Dickens Its searing exposure of the time and money-sapping fog of law is said to have led to changes in the legal system.
A Heart So White, Javier Marias No living author can write a halfpage sentence like the Spaniard, and nobody can turn a newly married man’s suspicions about his father – and the circumstances of his mother’s death – into such absorbing drama.
Freedom, Jonathan Franzen
Unlike the case in his novel The Corrections, Franzen here lingers longer, thanks to the rich, deeply drawn Berglund family. Political, personal, bored in the suburbs – it has the capacity to reach us all.
A Sentimental Education,
Gustave Flaubert Flaubert drew on his own life for this deeply cynical but helter-skelter account that combines political and social upheaval in the turbulent France of the 1830s.
One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez Fantastical and utterly compelling, this account of seven generations of the Buendia family is magic realism’s most celebrated novel.
The Magus, John Fowles A young Englishman teaching at a boarding school on a Greek island is drawn into the psychological games of a wealthy recluse on a beautiful estate. To the very last page, you struggle to know what is real and what is not.
Wilson, A Scott Berg
Berg presents American history through the life of Woodrow Wilson, one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. A fascinating account about the 28th president of the United States.
Let the Great World Spin,
Colum McCann McCann’s majestic novel intertwines the lives of his characters, which all unfold on the single day in 1974 when a tightrope walker in New York (modelled on the real Philippe Petit) tiptoed across a cable between the Twin Towers.