·         Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

The book that turned Sarah Waters into a superstar, this pacy and well-written piece of crime-'n'-crinoline Victorian grand guignol has it all: moustaches, dastardliness and lesbians. The plot twists like a greasy piglet, and is just as fun.

PR6073.A828 F56 2002

·         Possession: a Romance by AS Byatt

Byatt's Booker-winning potboiler (a term I use in praise) tells a double love-story: between two Victorian poets (a sort of nearly Browning and a sort of nearly Rossetti) and two modern-day academics who study them. One of the few books ever to make scholarship sound really exciting, it possesses the reader.

PR6052.Y2 P6 1991

·         The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

One night Sherman McCoy, a millionaire banker who thinks of himself as a "Master of the Universe", takes a wrong turn off a New York freeway and runs over a black teenager. This contact between the haves and the have-nots gives Wolfe license to satirize the excesses of New York society, and he takes full advantage of it.

PS3573.O526 B6 1990

·         A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." Or not so much a feast as a giant piss-up. But it is a beautifully evoked piss-up, and the atmosphere is wholly delightful as Hemingway recalls his younger days trying to make ends meet, knocking about with Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Scott Fitzgerald in the cafés of Paris.

PS3515.E37 Z475 1964

·         Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell

George Orwell was so honest that it is no surprise he gets shot in Homage to Catalonia. He learns to love the Spanish, or rather the Catalans, and therefore be exasperated by them, though just as obviously he fails to understand a motive in the Spanish Civil War even greater than different brands of Marxism, which is to say religion. But how compellingly his prose moves us on.

DP269.9 .O713 2003

·         The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

Set (for the first three volumes) between the wars, the ultimate romantic/coming of age/thriller/Gnostic fantasy novel. Overrated in the 1960s; underestimated now. Gripping, beautiful, irritating, intoxicating. It may change your life. Or you may hate it.

PR6007.U76 J8 1991

·         The Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard

The novels that make up The Cazalet Chronicles (The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion and Casting Off) first appeared between 1988 and 1995: it's hard to see how fans stood the wait between volumes. The story of a family approaching, experiencing and surviving the Second World War unfolds at pace, with couplings, uncouplings, disappearances and reunions to hold the attention on the longest of holidays.

PR6058.O88 M37 1993

·         King Solomon's Mines by H Rider Haggard

English hunter Allan Quartermain goes in search of the Biblical mines in the heart of darkest Africa. This classic adventure is today studied in universities for its dodgier aspects: the cruel King Twala who gets his head lopped off; the daring Englishman who must overcome Sheba's Breasts (a mountain range). But it's undeniably exciting, especially for boys of a certain age.

PR4731 .K5 1989

·         The Secret History by Donna Tartt

If all popular fiction were as well written as Donna Tartt's first novel, and if all literary fiction were as exciting, our beaches, dinner parties and libraries would be brighter and better places. A murder mystery-cum-campus novel, Tartt's charismatic, incestuous cabal of student classicists made Greats sound, well, great.

PS3570.A657 S4 1993

·         Kim by Rudyard Kipling

I was glad I came to Rudyard Kipling's Kim as a grown-up, because its style is as fresh and clear as the air of its Indian mountains setting. The Tibetan magic in it appeals to children, the exotic spirituality to us workers and the dusty adventures of the Grand Trunk Road and the Great Game to anyone.

PR4854 .K4 1987

·         The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz

The Egyptian master's three-volume, multi-generational family saga is something to sink deeply and gratefully into. Stately, plural, generous and humane, Mahfouz writes in the tradition of the great novelists of the 19th century. The Cairo Trilogy encompasses comedy and tragedy, the large movements of history and the tiniest domestic upset. It's really something.

PJ7846.A46 B313 1990

·         The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad was above all a virtuoso spinner of yarns. The Secret Agent is among his best, and takes place - which is nice, for readers prone to seasickness - on dry land, for once. Conrad's tale begins with a bang, and Verloc's pursuit thereafter of the sinister Professor is exciting, disturbing and absorbing.

PR6005.O4 S4 1993

·         The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Dashing young sailor, unjustly denounced, imprisoned and left for dead, unearths a cache of medieval treasure, disguises himself as the mysterious and implacable count and sweeps to his revenge. One of Dumas's greatest tales, this is adventure in the classic mould, bursting with thrilling heroism, black villainy and a near-indecent number of vendettas and double-crosses. Nearly every payback thriller written since owes it a debt.

PQ2226.A31 1996  

·         Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

Coleridge said that Tom Jones - along with Oedipus Tyrannus and The Alchemist - had one of the three most perfect plots ever planned. The foundling, brought up by a benign landowner in Somerset, grows up to have lusty and comic adventures through England. Notable scenes include Tom's rescue of a topless woman who insists on remaining topless once she sees him.

PR3454 .H5 1991

·         A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov's seductive, restless, cynical anti-hero Pechorin is one of the most enduringly vivid archetypes of 19th-century literature. Thrill to his death-defying Caucasian exploits! Gasp in dismay as he seduces and casts aside beautiful women! Wince as he courts destruction out of sheer boredom! He'll be, like, whatever… A pioneering existentialist; an essential novella.

PG3337.L4 G4133

·         Waverley by Walter Scott

A young Scottish officer is sent into the Highlands to help suppress the 1745 rebellion, but he is soon seduced not so much by the Jacobite cause as by the people and the scenery. Published in 1814, Scott's first novel is a sublime piece of propaganda for a Scotland that never existed but has none the less gone down as fact.

PR5322 .W4 1994

·         Byzantium: the Early Centuries; Byzantium: the Apogee; Byzantium: the Decline and Fall by John Julius Norwich

Narrative history at its epic best, with a thousand years of Byzantine tyrants, eunuchs and courtesans, from the emperor with the golden nose to the unfortunate ruler whose head ended up as a drinking goblet. Best read while sipping raki beside the Golden Horn – or shivering in a caravan in deepest Wales, dreaming of Byzantium.

DF553 .N67

·         A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul

This exquisitely written novel follows Salim, an East-African Indian, as he travels inland to a town at the end of the river. Alone in his shop, Salim grows bitter; but an affair with a beautiful married woman awakens his sensuality. Things begin to turn sour, though, as the Big Man who leads the country tightens his grip.

PR9272.9.N32 B4 1989

·         The Sicilian Vespers by Steven Runciman

In March 1282, as the bells of Palermo were ringing for vespers, the people of Sicily burst into history, roaming through the streets and slaughtering the soldiers of their French rulers. And this gem is not just the story of their rebellion; it's a fabulous history of the Mediterranean in the age of Dante.

DG867.28.R8 1958

·         The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Anyone who's had an argument with their partner on holiday will be grimly entertained by Port and Kit's antics in North Africa. There is some portentous stuff about the desert and the sky - but the real fun starts when the wife is kidnapped by Arabs towards the end.

PS3552.O874 S5 1977

·         Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Set in the early 1900s among the Igbo of Nigeria, this classic novel describes the tragic downfall of Okonkwo, a fierce tribesman whose way of life collapses when the Europeans colonise his country. Though unsentimental about pre-colonial Africa, Achebe writes with great sympathy for his protagonist.

PR9387.9.A3 T5 1994

Exception by The Daily Telegraph selection ”50 best ever summer holiday books”, 2008. Reviews by Sam Leith, Toby Clements, Sameer Rahim, Andrew McKie, Dominic Sandbrook, Christopher Howse, Tim Martin and Alex Clark.