A teen idol's candid memoir and fiction from a Danish table-tennis champion also make the cut
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iStock/The Independent
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Santa’s sleigh is likely to be heavy with empowerment books this Christmas, as the publishing world brings out its usual December glut of guides to mental wellbeing, bodily cleansing and dieting (collagen seems cool this year). There’s nothing wrong with new year’s resolutions, of course, but this splurge of advice brings to mind the late George Carlin’s routine: “If you are looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else? That’s not self-help – that’s help. Try to pay attention to the language we’ve all agreed on.”
Sarah Knight’s F**k No! How to stop saying yes when you can’t, you shouldn’t, or you just don’t want to is a manual for learning to say “no” with confidence. One person it was dangerous to refuse was Henry VIII. In the entertaining Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies, historian Hayley Nolan repositions Boleyn as an enlightened progressive. She made the mistake of marrying a “high-functioning narcissistic sociopathic”.
In Dave Eggers’ witty fable The Captain and the Glory, the fictional narcissist who takes command of a ship believes “all books are written by people who could not get erections”. It’s unlikely that macho Ernest Hemingway would have agreed. His wide-ranging travels in search of action are explored by his great-granddaughter Cristen Hemingway Jaynes in Ernest’s Way (Pegasus Books). The For Whom the Bell Tolls author often challenged people he’d just met “to an impromptu spar”. Luckily for him, he drank in elegant London areas like Mayfair and Pimlico. There is also a chapter on Hemingway’s time in Paris, a city that provides the setting for Agatha, a moving debut novel by Danish writer Anne Cathrine Bomann.
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40 books to read before you die
Show all 40
40 books to read before you die
1/40 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face.
2/40 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
3/40 Catch 22, Joseph Heller
It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage.
4/40 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming.
5/40 Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe
A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work.
6/40 1984, George Orwell
The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind.
7/40 To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum.
8/40 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
9/40 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book.
10/40 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition.
11/40 The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts.
12/40 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life.
13/40 Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile.
14/40 Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities.
15/40 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb
16/40 Middlemarch, George Eliot
This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously.
17/40 Secret History, Donna Tartt
Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home.
18/40 Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch.
19/40 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door.
20/40 Beloved, Toni Morrison
Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history.
21/40 Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language.
22/40 Dune, Frank Herbert
You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised.
23/40 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry.
24/40 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond.
25/40 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece.
26/40 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides.
27/40 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed.
28/40 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read.
29/40 Dracula, Bram Stoker
Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy.
30/40 The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger
It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose.
31/40 The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men.
32/40 Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that.
33/40 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963.
34/40 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy.
35/40 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side.
36/40 Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad.
37/40 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique.
38/40 The Trial, Frank Kafka
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance.
39/40 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker.
40/40 The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.
1/40 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face.
2/40 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
3/40 Catch 22, Joseph Heller
It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage.
4/40 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming.
5/40 Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe
A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work.
6/40 1984, George Orwell
The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind.
7/40 To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum.
8/40 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
9/40 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book.
10/40 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition.
11/40 The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts.
12/40 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life.
13/40 Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile.
14/40 Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities.
15/40 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb
16/40 Middlemarch, George Eliot
This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously.
17/40 Secret History, Donna Tartt
Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology - and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home.
18/40 Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch.
19/40 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door.
20/40 Beloved, Toni Morrison
Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history.
21/40 Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language.
22/40 Dune, Frank Herbert
You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised.
23/40 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry.
24/40 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond.
25/40 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece.
26/40 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides.
27/40 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed.
28/40 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read.
29/40 Dracula, Bram Stoker
Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy.
30/40 The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger
It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose.
31/40 The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men.
32/40 Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that.
33/40 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963.
34/40 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy.
35/40 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side.
36/40 Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad.
37/40 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique.
38/40 The Trial, Frank Kafka
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance.
39/40 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker.
40/40 The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.
December’s Star Wars film has spawned several book spinoffs, including The Art of Star Wars – The Rise of Skywalker by Phil Szostak (Abrams), and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, The Visual Dictionary (DK). There are also a couple of notable music books. Prince fans will enjoy the illustrated tribute My Name is Prince (Amistad/Harper Collins), which celebrates the 25-year collaboration between acclaimed photographer Randee St Nicholas and the groundbreaking musician. Idol Truth, a memoir by former teen pop idol Leif Garrett, contains disturbing stories about his own dysfunctional life. His account of the creepiness of Michael Jackson is stranger than fiction.
In the latest of our books of the month column, we review five books published in December 2019.
Hayley Nolan provides a powerful corrective to the sexist narrative around Henry VIII’s second wife
Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies by Hayley Nolan ★★★★☆
“Anne Boleyn was a kick-ass young woman,” writes Hayley Nolan in her new corrective history of Henry VIII’s wife. Nolan styles herself as a “Tudor whistleblower”. Her dynamic book is a direct response to what she describes as the lazy writers and sexist historians who have misrepresented Henry VIII’s second wife as little more than a “scheming seductress”. Her well-researched book is also a challenge to the glib “divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived” way of presenting Henry’s habit of having out-of-favour women brutally killed.
Nolan, the writer and presenter of the hit podcast The History Review, recasts Boleyn as a bold fighter for religious change. As Queen of England, Boleyn put evangelicals in high-profile positions and she exposed the sale of fake holy relics. During her three-year reign, she also championed young and poor people, setting up educational scholarships. Nolan argues that Boleyn’s power to do good has been censored for five centuries, adding, for balance, that this was “by men and an alarming number of female writers”.
She offers a fascinating alternative account to the “slutty narrative” that defined Boleyn, who has often been framed as a promiscuous and self-serving social climber, out to “snare” the king. Nolan does not whitewash Boleyn’s character. She details the side of the queen’s character that was excitable, paranoid and prone to issuing “childish threats”.
Boleyn had much to be paranoid about, of course, not least that the man she married was quite happy to see his wives beheaded. Nolan takes her own sword to Henry’s grotesque character. She describes him as “an undiagnosed, high-functioning sociopath”, and a narcissist with borderline personality disorder. His behaviour pattern with women was to “idealise, devalue and discard”. He was supported by a duplicitous, backstabbing cadre of men. As to whether he was ever in love with Boleyn, Nolan states: “I hate to be pedantic about this, but we cannot call a man who murdered two of his wives ‘romantic’”.
Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies is a powerful plea to stop normalising or romanticising the narrative around this brutal era. Nolan’s rebuttal of “anti-Boleyn propaganda” has a modern energy. When Nolan discusses Henry’s advances to the young Boleyn, for example, she notes: “So far, so Hollywood. Anne could hardly tell His Majesty to back off and jog on.” The slang may ruffle old-style academic feathers but, overall, Boleyn is well served by a fresh perspective.
Nolan also includes a mention for a minor character from that fateful day of 19 May 1536 that history books sometimes overlook. Spare a thought for the poor woman who was left clean up the severed head after Boleyn was decapitated with one blow of a sword.
Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies by Hayley Nolan is published on 1 December by Little A, £8.99
Teen idol Leif Garrett’s memoir is packed with offbeat, sometimes disturbing, anecdotes (Getty/Pantages Theatre)
Teen Idol by Leif Garrett ★★★☆☆
One of the many low points in the life of Leif Garrett was when a female prison guard pushed an old photograph of the pop superstar into his cell and said, laughing out loud, “Look at you now, you f***ing loser.”
Garrett was the quintessential teen idol. At 58, he has written a painful memoir about his fall from stardom, detailing “the darkest and worst things I have ever been through”. In the early 1970s, the handsome youngster appeared in dozens of films and television shows. When he moved into the world of pop music, he became a global superstar. Then his life collapsed, in a whirlwind of heroin addiction, car crashes, bankruptcy and jail.
Among the colourful cast of characters in the autobiography, ghostwritten by Chris Epting, are Michael Jackson, Brooke Shields, John Belushi and Freddie Mercury. The book is packed with offbeat, startling anecdotes. Garrett had a close friendship with Belushi, whom he visited at Universal Studios during the filming of The Blues Brothers. The scene sums up the excesses of the 1980s. “John, bloated and wired, was sitting at a table with a mirror that had about ten lines of blow on it. Next to that was a tray full of sushi and, next to that, a carafe of sake.”
There are touching memories – playing football with Pele and Rod Stewart sounds fun – and he presents a vivid picture of how disorienting it must have been for an ordinary teenager from a “dysfunctional family” to suddenly find himself famous enough to have his own television special. Garrett’s account of taking 14-year-old Shields on a date is amusing. Evading the paparazzi was a piece of cake compared to the scary encounter with Shields’s famously protective mother. “Teri whispered to me, with disarming calm, ‘You touch her, I’ll kill you. If there are any photos taken, I’ll kill you. Do you understand?’” Garrett recalls.
Nothing matches the weirdness of Michael Jackson, though. In February 1979, 17-year-old Garrett travelled to the Swiss ski resort Leysin to appear in a television show with ABBA, Bryan Ferry, Kate Bush and the Jackson 5. “I could tell Michael Jackson was going to ask me for a little bit of advice, like he usually did,” recalls Garrett. “‘Leif,’ he said, with a mixture of both mischievousness and excitement, ‘Can you tell me how to… masturbate?’ Okay, I did not see this coming [sic].”
Garrett recounts in exacting detail how he gave Jackson a copy of Penthouse magazine and some Lubriderm. A giggling Jackson later told him the upshot. “’I couldn’t do it, Leif. I just couldn’t do it. But… I looked through the magazine… Leif,’ he said, all wide-eyed and high-pitched. ‘Man, those pictures are nasty.’”
Garrett, who was three years younger than Jackson at the time, reflects on the oddity of this behaviour. “You may be wondering, given what we know today about the many allegations against Michael regarding young boys, if I think he was hitting on me,” writes Garrett. “Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe he was. Maybe he was asking me about girls as an excuse to make a connection with me. I’ll never know, and he is not here to defend himself, so I won’t make any assumptions.”
Garrett’s descent is told with honesty and his experience “trapped being a teen idol” did a lot of damage. “I made a conscious decision to not bring children into this world because, I’m sorry, I think it’s too crazy and dangerous a place,” he concludes. What a sorry thing stardom can be.
Idol Truth by Leif Garrett is published by Post Hill Press/Permuted Press on 5 December, £20
Fact or fiction? Dave Eggers’ latest is a broad satire on a dim leader with no shame (Getty)
The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers ★★★★☆
Dave Eggers has written a short, witty fable about a “cretinous, erratic, nihilistic and dim” charlatan, who takes over as the Captain of a ship called Glory. Can anyone imagine who he has in mind?
Like the 45th president of the United States, the protagonist in Eggers’ tale is a germaphobe – he worries that “most forks were covered in pubic hair” – and has trouble sleeping, because he is “fighting a thousand battles in his mind against his former teachers who had not thought him brilliant, all the women who did not swoon when he pushed his genitals at them in elevators”.
The account of how the Captain rises to power is enjoyably broad satire. “I like that guy,” said one passenger, “he says anything that pops into his head!” The story details the coterie of petty thieves and confidence men who make a buck from the captain’s success. His friends include “a murderer named Patsy and a patsy named Michael”, while his supporters – “The Most Foul” – “like to chant whatever the Captain suggested they chant”.
The pot-shots are bitingly funny. The Captain hates swarthy passengers. He likes cheeseburgers wrapped in plastic and looking at young women with luxurious hair. Instead of spewing his opinions out on Twitter, Eggers’ leader writes capitalised messages on a wipe-away board for the passengers to read, such as, “MY P-NUS: MUCH BETTER THAN PREVIOUS CAPTAIN’S.”
I won’t give away the ending, except to note that it does offer some hope for how people may survive a leader who has “no taste or manners or filter or shame or sense of what was true and what was false”.
The Captain and the Glory by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton on 6 December, £9.99
Sarah Knight’s self-help guide has the lowdown on acceptable fibs and blunt refusals
F**k No! How to stop saying yes when you can’t, you shouldn’t, or you just don’t want to by Sarah Knight ★★★☆☆
I never get invited to “networking events” but, thanks to Sarah Knight, I now know how to respond if asked… “No thanks. I hate that s**t”.
Knight’s The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k was a massive hit in 2015 and the follow-up, F**k No!, will likely prove popular with readers keen to learn how to say “no” with confidence. This self-help guide is full of puns, such as “becoming a no-it-all”, and has charts, graphics and tables to fill in and concrete examples of how to say “no” while sparing someone’s feelings. Along with light-hearted advice, Knight neatly guides readers through more serious situations when saying “no” matters, such as dealing with unpleasant neighbours or avoiding being rushed out of a doctor’s surgery. Knight also deals with setting and enforcing sexual boundaries.
Knight’s advice about acceptable fibs and blunt refusals (“nope, next question”) can apply not only to strangers and colleagues but to close relatives. “Ultimately, your family are just people, and it’s okay to say no to them,” she states. That advice might come in useful the next time boring old Uncle Billy invites you to a family do in Worthing.
F**k No! How to stop saying yes when you can’t, you shouldn’t, or you just don’t want to by Sarah Knight is published by Quercus on 12 December, £14.99
Anne Cathrine Bomann serves up a shrewd, skilful tale of loneliness
Agatha by Anne Cathrine Bomann ★★★★★
Anne Cathrine Bomann has an unusual background for a novelist. Bomann, who has written two poetry collections, a book about schizophrenia and a young adult story, is a Copenhagen-based psychologist who is also a 12-time Danish table-tennis champion.
She has received praise around the world for her wonderful debut novel Agathe, which is published in the UK this month as Agatha. The novel is translated by Caroline Wright and presented in a gorgeous cloth-bound edition.
Bomann played professional sport in France. She uses some of her old haunts as the setting for a novel based in Paris in 1948. The narrator is an unnamed 71-year-old psychiatrist, who is counting down to his retirement. He is jaded by his set of established patients and secretly mocks them for their “emotionally frigid marriages and wine bottles behind the bookcase”. He wonders if he can quietly die of boredom while Madame Almeida chunters on about her petty problems. “Disquiet and something much akin to sorrow collected in my chest, and I began to doubt whether I could last a whole day of compressed human suffering,” he admits. He is aware of his own dishonesty, and “disgusted” by this “sham”.
Everything changes when his secretary signs up 25-year-old Agatha Zimmermann as a new patient. As he slowly begins to fall for the mysterious, deeply troubled young German, we begin to understand his own loneliness and fear, and the “sad aches and invisibility of old age”. Although Agatha is like a wounded bird, she is not afraid of telling the truth. She is the first person to confront the psychiatrist about his own melancholy nature. “How can you understand other people if you don’t even know how you are?” she asks. The novel peels away the doctor’s mask to reveal a “bare, fearful man”.
Although the book is slight – 147 pages – it is a shrewd, skilful tale of loneliness, the search for meaning and a place in the world, and the problems of truly relating to another human being. The ending is sorrowful and joyful.
Agatha by Anne Catherine Bomann is published by Sceptre on 12 December, £9.99
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