5 EPIC WORKS YOU MUST READ…

…and 5 WORKS TO AVOID

It by Stephen King

If you are robust of disposition, this tale of Pennywise the dancing clown, and his pursuit of seven children, is a marvellous, sometimes shocking, tale of adolescent horror.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

The ultimate bildungsroman (and

Dickens’s most autobiographical work), this is populated by some of literature’s most vivid characters.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

Seth’s family saga set in post-partition India owes much to Dickens in its scale, and, like the work of his 19th-century forebear, deploys satire as a way of exploring society.

Underworld by Don de Lillo

If you manage to get past the interminable baseball game at the beginning, this is a thrilling, multifaceted novel about late-20thcentury America.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

West is generally best-known for such

fictional works as The Return of the Soldier, but this travel book, a study of Balkan history and ethnography, is a rigorous yet exhilarating experience.

Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford

This story of the English gentry in the early 20th century is maddeningly impenetrable. Whole incidents occur without you having realised.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

The author claimed that he could justify every line, yet the book’s opacity means that it’s incredibly hard to agree.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Bleak, cynical, weirdly juvenile, Rand’s extraordinary dystopian piece of incontinence beggars belief.

Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

Yes, it is hugely influential, but this mammoth epistolary work about a young woman’s quest for virtue is also, unquestionably, a slog.

Mission Earth by L Ron Hubbard

The Scientologist’s novel, published in 10 volumes, is a tedious tale of an alien race that comes to Earth. Presumably this has pride of place on Tom Cruise’s bookshelf, though what he makes of the narrative techniques is unclear.