Crimpson Sawter: a tale of lust, murder, justice and revenge...from the deep South.

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Crossroads they do things differently. They send a spy ahead of. He bites each one. When the twins themselves arrive before the. Not only that, but. The next day Hunahpu and Xbalanque play ball with the Xibalbans,. The Xibalbans insist on putting their own ball into play first, though. When Hunahpu hits it back to the.

Xibalbans with the yoke that rides on his hips, it falls to the. The Xibalbans consent to use the rubber ball belonging to the. After playing well for awhile the twins allow. This time they must spend the night in Razor. House, which is full of voracious stone blades that are constantly. In exchange for a promise that they will. This leaves the boys free to attend to the matter of the. The birds who guard this garden,.

The lords, who are aghast when they receive bowls filled with. Next, the hero twins survive stays in Cold House, which is full of. The head ends up rolling on the. While he is busy with this head transplant the eastern sky reddens. Not only the red dawn but. In the future a new. Thought, and Wind- will ever correspond to the first day of a solar. Contemporary Quiche daykeepers continue to reckon the solar. Once Hunahpu has been fitted out with a squash for a head, he and. Xbalanque are ready to play ball with the Xibalbans again.

A rabbit decoys the. Xbalanque retrieves the head, puts it back on Hunahpu's shoulders, and. Now the squash is put. The game played with the squash, like the games. If these events were combined in chronological. Venus in the east, the direction of morning and life. At this point we are ready for the last of the episodes that. Knowing that the lords of Xibalba plan to burn them,. Hunahpu and Xbalanque instruct two seers named Xulu and Pacam as to. This done, the twins cheerfully accept an invitation. The lords challenge them to a.

They gain great fame as. The lords of Xibalba get news of all this and. The climax of their performance comes when. Xbalanque sacrifices Hunahpu, rolling his head out the door,. Seven Death go wild at the sight of this and demand that they. The twins oblige- and, as might already be. Xbalanque now reveal their true identities before all the. They declare that henceforth, the.

At this point the narrative takes us back to the twins' grandmother,. She cries when the. She burns incense in front of ears from the new crop and thus. Then the scene shifts back to Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who are about. Having made their speech to the defeated Xibalbans, the twins go. Seven Hunahpu, whose head and body still lie buried there. They leave him there, but they promise that human beings will keep his.

To this day, Hunahpu days are set aside for the veneration of the. At the astronomical level the visit of Hunahpu and Xbalanque to. As for the twins themselves, they rise as the sun and moon. Contemporary Quiches regard the full moon as a nocturnal equivalent of. Most likely the twin who became the moon. Woman, the mother of the twins, would account for the other phases. With the ascent of Hunahpu and Xbalanque the Popol Vuh returns to. As we have already seen, the gods failed when they tried. Xmucane grinds the corn from this mountain very finely,.

The first people to be modeled from the corn dough. They are the first four heads of Quiche patrilineages; as in. This time the beings shaped by the gods are everything they hoped. Next they make four wives for the four men, and. Seahouse becomes the wife of Jaguar Quitze, who founds the Cauec. Mahucutah, who founds the Lord Quiche lineage. True Jaguar is also. All these early events in human history take place in darkness,. Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night,. Mahucutah, and True Jaguar decide to change their situation by. The particular Tulan called Zuyua was.

But in giving Tulan Zuyua the further name. Seven Caves, the Popol Vuh preserves the memory of a metropolis much. This ultimate Tulan was at. Only recently it has been discovered that beneath. Countless lineages and tribes converge on the Tulan Zuyua of the. Popol Vuh, and each of them, starting with the Quiches, is given a. The Cauecs receive the god named Tohil, the Greathouses receive.

Auilix, and the Lord Quiches receive Hacauitz. The worship of Tohil has recently been traced back. The Popol Vuh tells us that although "all the tribes were sown and. The cause of this was that some peoples were given. The language of the Rabinals became only slightly. Tohil, but others, who received gods with completely distinctive. Cakchiquels, the Bird House people, and the Yaqui people. Tzutuhils speak related but separate languages.

What the Popol Vuh. Those languages belong to a family that not only stands apart from. Quiche, Cakchiquel, and Tzutuhil, but from Mayan languages in general. Tohil is the source of the first fires kept by human beings,. When a great hailstorm puts all these fires out, Tohil restores. Only the Cakchiquels, who get their fire by sneaking. At the suggestion of Tohil the Quiches leave Tulan. Packing their gods on their backs and watching continuously for the. Potonchan or Tixchel, both lowland Maya sites where causeways pass. They also pass the Great Abyss, the location of. Next they enter the highlands, turning west and.

With them at Place of Advice,. Rabinals, Cakchiquels, and Bird House people. Auilix, and Hacauitz speak to them, asking to be given hiding places. They are not yet placed in temples atop. At the place of Hacauitz, on a mountaintop, the Cauecs,. Greathouses, and Lord Quiches weep while they wait for the dawn; the. Tams and Ilocs wait on nearby mountains, while peoples other than. When, at last, they all see.

At this point we reach the moment in the account of human affairs. On just this one occasion he appears as. His heat turns Tohil, Auilix, and Hacauitz to stone, along with such. He remains to this day as a gamekeeper, with stone fetishes. At first the Quiches rejoice when they see the first sunrise, but. In the words of this song they wonder where their brothers. In effect, the coming of the first. In point of fact Mesoamerican peoples. Having seen the first sunrise from the mountain of Hacauitz, the.

Quiches eventually build a citadel there. But at first, even while the. When they go before the. The three gods are still able. From hiding places on mountain peaks, they begin imitating the cries. Finally Tohil tells the Quiches to go ahead and take human beings. They begin to seize. At first the lords who rule the. Again and again they are foiled by rain,. They send two beautiful maidens, Xtah and Xpuch, to. They warn the maidens to return with proof of.

Contrary to plan, the three Quiche gods fail to lust after Xtah. Night, and the third painted with swarms of yellow jackets and wasps. When the maidens return the enemy lords are so pleased. Xtah and Xpuch are spurned; despite their failure to. The enemy warriors come at night in order to get as far as. The Quiches not only strip them of all the metal ornaments on. Even so the enemy warriors press on the next day,. What the enemy lookouts see all around the citadel of Hacauitz is a.

What the lookouts do not see is that these warriors are mere wooden. As for the Quiches on the inside, what they. But Tohil has made them so confident that they treat the. When they release the yellow jackets and. The survivors become permanent payers of tribute to. First they sing "The Blame Is. Ours," and then they explain to their wives and successors that "the.

This is a reference to. Jaguar Quitze leaves a sacred object called the. The Quiche lords of the second generation, following the. Unlike their fathers, they do this. Coahau, the only son of Mahucutah, represents the Lord Quiches. If they were retracing their fathers' route in detail, they.

They do not go to Tulan Zuyua, which may have been in ruins by this. He gives them the emblems that go with the two highest. Both these titles, the one belonging to a head of. From other sources we know that the Greathouse and Lord Quiche. Minister ranking third going to one and that of Crier to the.

Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero (1929)

People ranking fourth to the other. Cocaib, Coacutec, and Coahau return "from across the sea" with the. Sea," we may guess that it was the Popol Vuh they brought back, and. The sovereign lordship of the returned pilgrims is recognized not only. Bird House people as well. Only now do the Quiche lords begin to. Hunahpu and Xbalanque in Xibalba, who had only the planet Venus to. Later, after the death of the widows of Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night,. The Popol Vuh mentions only one of these by name,.

Thorny Place, settled at some point after the deaths of Cocaib,. The ruins of Thorny Place, which are divided. This location may have been chosen because it was a. This time, with Cotuha as Keeper of the Mat and Iztayul as. Keeper of the Reception House Mat, they found the citadel of Bearded.

Place, directly across a canyon to the south from the site of what. At Bearded Place there is great harmony among the Cauecs,. Greathouses, and Lord Quiches; these three lineages, each with its own. At Thorny Place women. The only disturbance during this period comes. They are defeated, and some of their own. Cauec, Greathouse, and Lord Quiche lineages now rise to greater and. In the next generation the Keeper of the Mat bears the divine name. They build a new and. The Cauecs divide into nine segments, the. Greathouses into nine, and the Lord Quiches into four, with each of.

In addition, the inhabitants of Rotten Cane include the Zaquics, a. Along with all these palaces, Rotten Cane is. The Popol Vuh identifies Plumed Serpent, who holds the titles of. As the Popol Vuh explains it, his displays are "just his. The next Quiche lords to manifest genius,. Under their rule the dominion of the Quiches reaches its greatest. Where Plumed Serpent gained power through spectacular displays.

During this period the settlement at the center of the Quiche. Together with the ordinary houses that occupied the lower. It was perhaps the most densely built-up area that. Coahau had gone to receive the titles and emblems of truly glorious. Five generations after their pilgrimage a new conferring. The town of Quiche not only took on the status of the place.

When the founders of the ruling Quiche. Great Abyss and convened at Place of Advice. Now, in this latter. It is in the course of explaining the greatness of lords like Plumed. Serpent and Quicab that the writers of the alphabetic Popol Vuh tell. Greatness also came to the. The shortest fast lasted days,. The longest fast, days, corresponded to a segment of the Mayan. Venus calendar, beginning with the departure of Venus as the morning.

Xibalba, the long darkness endured by the first generation of lords as. The Quiche lords sought identification with the very gods, not. Just as the gods needed human beings to nurture them with offerings,. Vuh points out, the "nurture" required by the Quiche lords consisted. Apparently such precious objects as these were considered the. Near the end, the Popol Vuh lists all the noble titles held by the.

Mat, the text lists four generations after Quicab and Cauizimah, who. The first is, "And they were ruling when Tonatiuh. Pedro de Alvarado, the man whose forces destroyed Rotten Cane in In the thirteenth generation of Cauecs the Popol Vuh lists Tecum and. Tepepul, who were "tributary to the Castilian people.

Spanish names, Juan de Rojas and Juan Cortes, the living holders of. Mat when the alphabetic Popol Vuh was written. Cortes need not be taken as constituting an exhaustive genealogy but. By giving us the names of Quiche lords who were alive while they. They could not have finished it any later. And since they mention Pedro de Robles of the Greathouse. This places the writing of the Popol Vuh during the very.

The version of the Popol Vuh that comes down to us does not. It may be that the indigenous lords of highland Guatemala chose. Mahucutah, and True Jaguar had once called "the time of our Lord. Juan Cortes, whose duties as Keeper of the Reception. House Mat would have included tribute collection had he served. In he went. He continued to make. By the time the authors of the Popol Vuh have finished giving the. At this point they single out one of the. Without naming any individuals, they point out that each. Here we may recall that when the authors introduced the. If we look for a convener of banquets and maker of toasts.

If our mysterious authors were. The authors give us one final clue to their identity when they. The focus on "the Word," coming as it does. Toastmasters and the Word written down in the alphabetic Popol Vuh are. If so, we know the name of at least one of the. At the end of their work the authors repeat the enigma they. They close on a note of reassurance, asking us, in effect,.

Quiche," meaning the place named Quiche. Then, lest we forget their. Santa Cruz," or "Holy Cross. Today, even when Quiche daykeepers go to a remote mountaintop. Father" and a "Hail Mary" and crossing themselves. It is as if the. Between these protective spells daykeepers are left to. So it is with the authors of the Popol Vuh, who mention.

Christendom on the first page, Holy Cross on the last page, and open. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Popol Vuh, considered in. At Palenque, in the sanctuary of each temple in what is now known as. In each case the text is divided into two panels, one of which. Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and the other of which ends with the deeds of. So also with the Popol Vuh: The characters in the. After this episode, in which the gods act. The people in question are the first four. Once their perfect vision has been taken away the narrative begins. We tend to think of myth and history as being in conflict with one.

In the case of ancient. Chinese literature the Book of Changes, which is like the Popol Vuh in. To this day the Quiche Maya think of dualities in general as. Instead of being in logical opposition to one. If we had an English word that fully expressed the Mayan. For Mayans, the presence of a divine dimension in. At one end of the Popol Vuh the gods are preoccupied.

The difference between a fully mythistorical sense of narrative time. Mayans are always alert. Later, when members of the second. The effect of these. In theory, if we who presently claim to be human were to forget. For them, the forgotten force of divinity reasserted itself. Today they are swinging through the. On the holy day Eight Monkey. Spanish j or German ch. Spanish r, otherwise trilled like Spanish rr. Stress is always on the final syllable of a word. Ancient Word, the potential and source for everything done in the.

Hunahpu Possum, Hunahpu Coyote,. Great White Peccary, Tapir,. Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea,. Maker of the Blue-Green Plate,. Maker of the Blue-Green Bowl,. They accounted for everything-. We shall write about this now amid the preaching of God, in. There is the original book and ancient writing, but.

Now it still ripples, now it still murmurs, ripples, it still sighs,. Here follow the first words, the first eloquence: There is not yet one person, one animal, bird, fish, crab, tree,. Only the sky alone is there; the. Only the sea alone is pooled under all. It is at rest;.

Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: Whatever might be is simply not there: Only the Maker, Modeler alone, Sovereign Plumed. Serpent, the Bearers, Begetters are in the water, a glittering. Thus the name, "Plumed Serpent. And of course there is the sky, and there is also the Heart of. And then came his word, he came here to the Sovereign Plumed. Serpent, here in the blackness, in the early dawn.

They agreed with each other, they joined their. So there were three of them, as Heart of Sky, who came to the. Sovereign Plumed Serpent, when the dawn of life was conceived: But there will be. And then the earth arose because of them, it was simply their word. For the forming of the earth they said "Earth. It arose suddenly, just like a cloud, like a mist, now forming,. By their genius alone,. And the Plumed Serpent was pleased with this: Our work, our design will turn out. And the earth was formed first, the mountain-plain.

The waters were divided when the great mountains appeared. Such was the formation of the earth when it was brought forth by the. Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth, as they are called, since they were. Such was their plan when they thought, when they worried about the. A Bearer, Begetter speaks: And then they gave out homes to the deer and birds: So then they established the nests of the birds, small and great: Multiply there, scatter there, in the branches of. When this deed had been done, all of them had received a place to. So it is that the nests of the animals. Don't moan, don't cry out.

We are your mother, we are your. Newborn Thunderbolt, Raw Thunderbolt,. Heart of Sky, Heart of Earth,. Since we are their mason and sculptor, this will not do," the. Bearers and Begetters said among themselves. So they told them: Since it hasn't turned. Although it turned out that our days were not kept, nor. And then they wanted to test their timing again, they wanted to. They had not heard their speech among the animals; it did not. And so their flesh was brought low: The time for the planting and. For this we must make a provider and nurturer. So then comes the building and working with earth and mud.

It was just separating,. Its head wouldn't turn, either. Its face was just. It couldn't look around. It can't walk and it can't. So then they dismantled, again they brought down their work and. Then they invoked Xpiyacoc, Xmucane. These are names of Xpiyacoc and Xmucane. When Hurricane had spoken with the Sovereign Plumed Serpent, they. So be it, fulfill your names: Bearer twice over, Begetter twice over,. Great Peccary, Great Tapir,. Grandmother of Day, Grandmother of Light. You have been called upon because of our work, our design.

Then they spoke to them, one of them a grandmother, the other a. This is the grandfather, this is the master of the coral seeds: Xpiyacoc is his name. And this is the grandmother, the daykeeper, diviner who stands. And they said, as they set out the days: Is this to be the provider, the nurturer. You corn kernels, you coral seeds,. The moment they spoke it was done: This was the peopling of the face of the earth: They came into being, they multiplied, they had daughters, they.

But there was nothing in their. They just went and walked wherever they wanted. And so they fell, just an experiment and just a cutout for. They were talking at first but their faces were dry. They had no blood, no. They had no sweat, no fat. Their complexions were dry, their. They flailed their legs and arms, their bodies were. And so they accomplished nothing before the Maker, Modeler who.

They became the first numerous. A great flood was made; it came down on the heads of. And as for the woman, the Maker, Modeler needed. They were not competent,. There came the one named Gouger of Faces: There came Sudden Bloodletter: There came Crunching Jaguar: There came Tearing Jaguar: They were pounded down to the bones and tendons, smashed and.

Their faces were smashed because they. The earth was blackened because of this; the. Every day, every day,. This was the service we gave you at first, when you were still people,. We shall pound and we shall. And this is what their dogs said, when they spoke in their turn: We just watch and you. You keep a stick ready. We don't talk, so we've received. How could you not have known? You did know that we.

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And then their tortilla griddles and cooking pots spoke to them in. That's all you've done for us. Our mouths are sooty, our. By setting us on the fire all the time, you burn. Since we felt no pain, you try it. We shall burn you," all their. They want to climb up on the houses, but they fall as the houses.

They want to climb the trees; they're thrown off by the trees. They want to get inside caves, but the caves slam shut in their. Such was the scattering of the human work, the human design. The mouths and faces of all of. And it used to be said that the. They were left as a. So this is why monkeys look like people: But there was one who magnified.

The sky-earth was already there, but. Even so, it is said that. My place is now higher than that of the human work, the. I am their sun and I am their light, and I am also their. I am the walkway and I am the foothold. Since my nest is metal, it lights up the face of the earth. It must be so, because. It is not true that he is the sun, this Seven Macaw, yet he. But the scope of his face. The faces of the sun, moon, and stars. And so Seven Macaw puffs himself up as the days and the months,. This was when the flood was worked. And now we shall explain how Seven Macaw died, when the people. Drawings by the author.

Being gods, the two of them saw evil in his attempt. So the boys talked: We could shoot him while he's at his. We could make him ill, then put an end to his riches, his. Everyone might do as he does, but it should not come to be that. So be it," said the. And this Seven Macaw has two sons: And Chimalmat is the name of their. And this is Zipacna, this is the one to build up the great.

Huliznab, as the names of the mountains that were there at the dawn. They were brought forth by Zipacna in a single night. And now this is the Earthquake. The mountains are moved by him;. Seven Macaw did this just as a means of self-magnification. I am the sun," said Seven Macaw. I am the maker of the earth," said Zipacna.

The sons of Seven Macaw are alike, and like. And the two boys saw evil in this, since our first mother and father. Therefore deaths and disappearances were. Photo by Justin Kerr. Maya vase painting from the lowlands, Seven Macaw is shown perched. The tree itself is portrayed as animate,. Hidden behind the tree is Xbalanque,. The presence of a scorpion beneath the tree remains. And when Seven Macaw arrived, perching over his meal, the nance,.

The blowgun shot went right. Then he went up over the tree and fell. He yanked it straight back, he bent it back. Then Seven Macaw tore it right out of Hunahpu. And when Seven Macaw had taken the arm of Hunahpu, he went home. Holding his jaw very carefully, he arrived: But once what I've got is over the fire- hanging there, dangling. Meanwhile Hunahpu and Xbalanque were thinking. And then they invoked. White Peccary is the name of the grandfather, and Great White Tapir is.

The boys said to the grandmother and. Perhaps we should give them away, since all we do is pull worms out of. After that they approached the place where Seven Macaw was in. When the grandmother and grandfather passed by, the. When they passed below the. And when Seven Macaw saw the grandfather and grandmother. Aren't those your children. They're our grandchildren, our. Since the lord is getting. What sweets can you make,. They really ache, every day. I get no sleep because of them- and my eyes. Ever since it started I haven't. Therefore take pity on me! It's a worm, gnawing at the bone.

It's merely a matter of putting in a replacement and taking the. My finery is in my teeth- and my eyes. Ground bone will be put back. Give me some help here! And when the teeth of Seven Macaw came out, it was only white corn. His face fell at once, he no. The last of his teeth came out, the. And then the eyes of Seven Macaw were cured.

When his eyes were. Still he felt no. And when Seven Macaw died, Hunahpu got back his arm. Chimalmat, the wife of Seven Macaw, also died. Such was the loss of the riches of Seven Macaw: The genius of the grandmother, the genius of the. Just as they had wished the. They had seen evil. After this the two boys went on again. What they did was simply. And this is Zipacna, bathing on the shore.

Then the Four Hundred. Boys passed by dragging a log, a post for their hut. Hundred Boys were walking along, having cut a great tree for the. And then Zipacna went there, he arrived where the Four Hundred. We can't lift it up to carry it. Where does it go? What do you intend to use it for? And then he pulled it, or rather carried it, right on up to the.

Do you have a mother and father? After that the Four Hundred Boys shared their thoughts: Let's dig a big hole for him, and then we'll throw. We'll say to him: Then he should die in the hole," said the Four Hundred Boys. And when they had dug a hole, one that went deep, they called for. After that he went down in the hole. But the only hole. He realized that he was to be. Some of these are even caused by the children themselves. Xan Brooks Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. He then returns to Abyssinia. Ian Pindar Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

Kantor also shows how the ordinary prisoners were preyed upon by a gang of thugs called the Raiders, led by a Union soldier called William Collins. Drawing on his extensive research of the incident, Keneally spares the reader none of the horrors of war. Oskar Schindler, a German businessman and Nazi party member, set up a factory in Poland producing supplies for the German army.

By the end of the war he had become an unlikely hero, risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from being sent to the concentration camps. When his plane is shot down, he parachutes to safety in a German prisoner-of-war camp, but after the war he discovers his crew are all dead. The novel ponders the question, why did so many of the accused meekly confess their guilt in court?

After losing his parents in the mayhem of the second world war, a Polish child wanders through the countryside at the mercy of the brutal and ignorant central or eastern European villagers he encounters, who assume he is a Jew or a Gypsy. Dogged by controversy, Kosinski committed suicide in , leaving behind a note: Levi, most renowned for his coruscating documentary report on life in a concentration camp, If This Is A Man, published this, his only novel, in Set in , it follows a group of Jewish partisans making their way, behind enemy lines, across a Europe unmarked by place names and directions, with Palestine their aim.

It is the German guns of the title that must be silenced to permit the evacuation of the British troops from a nearby island, and so change the course of the war. This is both a coming of age story and an elegy for a lost American era. Blood Meridian is not a revisionist western so much as a gore-soaked demolition of the myth of manifest destiny.

The New World is born out of violence. California in the s was the origin of the famous masked crusader and camper, sexier and more ironic American-style Robin Hood. Mailer was just 26 when his debut novel was published, three years after the end of the second world war.

Popol Vuh (Mayan)

His tale of a platoon of young American soldiers making their way through treacherous jungle on the Japanese-held island of Anopopei was without respite. Its focus on the ordinary American in all his bullying pettiness and fear, its detailed depictions of armed combat and insight into the psychology of men in pursuit of power caught the mood of an American public searching for the reality of war; it made this a bestseller and Mailer a superstar. Six novels in two trilogies: This is a brilliant portrait of a particular marriage and of the world at war.

Dramatic, comic and entirely absorbing, it was televised, equally brilliantly, by the BBC in Carmen Callil Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The jungle town of Macondo is a place where it is as possible to ascend heavenwards while hanging the laundry as to be machine-gunned by agents of the local banana company. This novel remains the beacon of magical realism and the standard bearer for Latin American literature; in Spanish, only Don Quixote has been more successful.

Fluid, funny, wise, political: His wife dies shortly thereafter, leaving their four children orphans. The story follows their growing to adulthood and — with the Restoration — the rebuilding of Arnwood and the Beverley family fortunes. The novel was immensely popular with Victorian children and became the pattern for innumerable juvenile tales over the next century.

We all know the story: This is the novel of restless human drive: A Very Big Theme, necessarily expressed in dense, wildly idiosyncratic prose as ambitious as Ahab himself. The timeless, repetitive waiting. Ida, a widowed schoolteacher, is living in s Rome with her two sons: Nino, a reckless and angry teenager, and baby Giuseppe, conceived when Ida is raped by a German soldier. She like Morante herself is half-Jewish, and lives in a permanent state of fear that her forbidden faith will be discovered.

Her handwritten manuscript was salvaged by her two young daughters who, orphaned and traumatised, did not release it for publication until 64 years later. Few heroes emerge in this take on French manners exposed in the most extreme circumstances. Emily Mann Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Orczy had huge success with her foppish, inane, kind-hearted, cold, proud, passionate and indefatigable Pimpernel and his wonderful wife Marguerite. Belief may need to be suspended as Orczy allows him to escape yet another tricky situation, but when the thrills are this swashbuckling, it is churlish to care.

Flory, a timber merchant disillusioned with the Imperial racket, falls for a pretty girl sent out east to stay with her relatives. Steeped in essence of Maugham and crammed with impressionistic descriptions of the Burmese landscape, it also harbours many an early signpost from the road that led to Nineteen Eighty-Four. DJ Taylor Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Its staggering intellectual weight is what really leaves a dent, however, using the development of the V2 rocket in Nazi Germany as a starting point for a novel that is as densely packed as grey matter and equally mysterious.

Victoria Segal Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Raspe himself lived a shadily picaresque life but could only have been an amateur compared with the baron, whose stories leap from the sublime to the ridiculous — then keep on jumping. The soldiers reserve their hatred not for the enemy but the armchair warriors on the home front. A literal hatchet job. Riobaldo, an old farmer living in the arid hinterlands of Brazil, tells the story of how he became the leader of a gang of bandits, revealing on the way that he may have sold his soul to the devil.

After a duel with a wicked marquis leaves his friend dead, the young man stirs up discontent against the upper classes and is forced to become a fugitive, joining a wandering theatre troupe as disguise. Those staples of historical adventures — honour, vengeance and dark family secrets — provide the kerosene; the political intrigue strikes the match. Dr Peter Syn is an Irish surgeon, peacefully plying his healing trade in the west country.

The sentence is commuted to transportation to the Barbadoes. Pirates of the Caribbean adventures ensue, before a happy-ever-after in Devon. Buckles never swashed more dashingly. Others have been deeply irritated by this story of a young American Jew who visits Ukraine in search of the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis.

What do they hate so much? After a series of bestselling Scottish novels, the Wizard of the North still anonymous to his contemporary readers turned to English history. The story is set in the 12th century, at the time of the crusades. King Richard has been captured on his return from the Holy Land. Now less read than it deserves to be. The most famous animal story of the 19th century.

The novelty of the work is that it is narrated by a horse apparently sexless , which is miraculously able to talk like a well-brought-up Victorian servant. Maus exploded not merely any preconceptions about appropriate subject matter for a comic strip, but also suggested that the unspeakable might best be rethought through unexpected means.

Adam Newey Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. A much loved, popular novel that almost transcended the cult label. He meets and mocks both his fellow English travellers on their Grand Tours and the French philosophes whom he visits in their Paris salons Sterne, as the celebrated author of Tristram Shandy, had recently cut a swathe through fashionable Parisian society.

Oddly enough, these are usually attractive young women who are happy to have their pulses felt by a sympathetic gentleman. David Balfour, an orphan, comes to live with his villainous uncle, Ebenezer of Shaws. Having failed to murder his ward himself, Ebenezer has his nephew kidnapped, as a white slave, on the brig Covenant. The vessel runs down a rowing boat containing a Jacobite rebel, Alan Breck. He and David conspire to escape their captors and, on land, the brutal English soldiery who are still ravaging Scotland. Alan takes refuge in France.

Also on board their vessel, the Hispaniola, is the villainous, one-legged sea-cook, Long John Silver, who takes over the vessel. Without it, we would never have had Pirates of the Caribbean. Then on his last voyage he meets the Houyhnhnms, virtuous and perfectly rational talking horses, and his pride collapses into misanthropy and self-loathing. He and we are just Yahoos, the malevolent, cunning, libidinous beasts with whom the Houyhnhnms are fated to share their land.

Its dispassionate eye follows peasants, emperors, soldiers, and priests through decades, taking in life and death in all its forms. This is no heroic tale of good versus evil, of strategies and battle formations, but a vivid depiction of the banality, tedium and senselessness of war. Its everyman hero, Pierre played unforgettably on TV by Anthony Hopkins , blunders along, struggling to find meaning in his life, and each of the dozen or so central characters battle their own demons, searching for truth and peace.

Their struggles are timeless, as is the unforgettable love story at its heart. Imogen Tilden Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Huck escapes, and drifts by raft down the Mississippi, with a runaway slave, Jim. After various adventures and reunion with Tom all comes well. At the end, the two young heroes intend to light out to the Indian territory — a sequel Twain never wrote. Master of the voyage imaginaire , Verne also revealed himself adept at mingling high adventure with Thomas Cook-style tourism.

Fogg, having read of a new railway link in the Indian subcontinent, wagers his fellow Reform Club members that he can circumnavigate the world in 80 days. The itinerary is meticulously chronicled. Fogg arrives back to foggy London, as he thinks, a day late — but he has forgotten that he has crossed the date line. He makes it to the club with seconds to spare. A williwaw is a snow-laden hurricane, and 50 years before The Perfect Storm was a bestseller, Vidal showed us how it should be done.

Our fresh-faced hero embarks on his picaresque journey across Europe and Latin America, which sees Enlightenment optimism sorely tested by — among other delights — rape, murder, syphilis, cannibalism, the wanton destructiveness of natural forces and the human cost of the western addiction to sugar. He is, perhaps, mad. Or, as he believes, he has been given the power of clairvoyance and time travel by extraterrestrial Tralfamadorians, whose prisoner he is.

The Tralfamadorians have destroyed the universe by their bombing error but can enjoy the good moments of their previous existences. The narrative recoils from graphic description of wartime atrocity to fanciful space opera. As Konnegut records, it was an immensely painful novel to write and, for all its incidental comedy and literary skill, remains painful to read.

But necessary, none the less. Basil Seal, posh and feckless, has been a leader writer on the Daily Beast, a champagne salesman, a tour guide, a secret policeman in Bolivia, and an adviser on modernisation to the emperor of Azania — all way relationship between a young southern writer, a Polish Auschwitz survivor and a Jewish New Yorker interweaves a host of complex themes survivor guilt, ancestral guilt, madness and betrayal.

The movie was Oscar-nominated; the book was banned in libraries across the States. But this is not just about provocative comparisons. Guy Crouchback is the last of an ancient English Catholic family — miserable, childless, divorced and forbidden by his religion to remarry.

At 35, the outbreak of war seems to give meaning to his life: Under his Darwinian scalpel, animals are raised to quasi-humanity. Moreau is killed by a puma he is tormenting and rebellion breaks out. The animals revert to their natural animalism. After their school takes a hit during an air-raid, McGill and his friends make use of the free time to wage their own war against the enemy. The Machine Gunners, which was adapted into a BBC television serial in , brilliantly evokes Tyneside in the second world war and the disruption to ordinary family life, while capturing the complicated relationships that exist between children and adults.

James Smart Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Voss, a German explorer, sets out in to cross the uncharted Australian desert. Before leaving, he meets Laura Trevelyan, a young Englishwoman newly arrived in the colony, and they fall in love. All the future cliches are here, but new-minted: This book has all the freshness of a literary pioneer. Jean Macquart, earthy and pragmatic, wins the respect of the intellectual and mercurial Maurice Levasseur. Andrew Pulver Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Set aboard a vast generation starship millennia after blast-off, the novel follows Roy Complain on a voyage of discovery from ignorance of his surroundings to some understanding of his small place in the universe.

Complain is spiteful and small-minded but grows in humanity as his trek through the ship brings him into contact with giant humans, mutated rats and, ultimately, a wondrous view of space beyond the ship. Eric Brown Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Hari Seldon invents the science of psychohistory with which to combat the fall into barbarianism of the Human Empire, and sets up the Foundation to foster art, science and technology. Wish-fulfilment of the highest order, the novels are a landmark in the history of science fiction.

EB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. On planet Zycron, tyrannical Snilfards subjugate poor Ygnirods, providing intercoital entertainment for a radical socialist and his lover. We assume she is Laura Chase, daughter of an Ontario industrialist, who records their sex and sci-fi stories in a novel, The Blind Assassin. Iris is 83 in the cantankerous present-day narrative, and ready to set the story straight about the suspicious deaths of her sister, husband and daughter. In this Booker prize-winning novel about novels, Atwood bends genre and traps time, toying brilliantly with the roles of writing and reading.

Natalie Cate Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Anna Blume, 19, arrives in a city to look for her brother. She finds a ruin, where buildings collapse on scavenging citizens. All production has stopped. Nobody can leave, except as a corpse collected for fuel. Anna buys a trolley and wanders the city, salvaging objects and information.

She records horrific scenes, but also a deep capacity for love. This small hope flickers in a world where no apocalyptic event is specified. Instead, Auster creates his dystopia by magnifying familiar flaws and recycling historical detail: NC Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Consider Phlebas introduced the first of many misguided or untrustworthy heroes — Horza, who can change his body just by thinking about it — and a typically Banksian collision involving two giant trains in an subterranean station.

PD Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. A magic carpet is the last refuge of a people known as the Seerkind, who for centuries have been hunted by both humans and the Scourge, a mysterious being that seems determined to live up to its name. Nicola Barker has been accused of obscurity, but this Booker-shortlisted comic epic has a new lightness of touch and an almost soapy compulsiveness. A jumble of voices and typefaces, mortal fear and sarky laughter, the novel is as true as it is truly odd, and beautifully written to boot. He sends him back to the far future in an attempt to save the Eloi woman Weena, only to find himself in a future timeline diverging from the one he left.

Bear combines intelligence, humour and the wonder of scientific discovery in a techno-thriller about a threat to the future of humanity. A retro-viral plague sweeps the world, infecting women via their sexual partners and aborting their embryos. Somehow surviving, he swiftly gets down to it. Those who stumble across it are inevitably surprised to find it was written half a century ago.

Along the way he joins up with a group of vampires, finds his true family and discovers what he really values, amid much blood, sex, drugs and drink. Keith Brooke Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Al Barker is a thrillseeking adventurer recruited to investigate an alien labyrinth on the moon. Barker is the first person to survive the trauma of witnessing their own death, returning again and again to explore.

Rogue Moon works as both thriller and character study, a classic novel mapping out a new and sophisticated SF, just as Barker maps the alien maze. KB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. When the Devil comes to s Moscow, his victims are pillars of the Soviet establishment: This is just a curtain-raiser for the main event, however: For his hostess, his satanic majesty chooses Margarita, a courageous young Russian whose lover is in a psychiatric hospital, traumatised by the banning of his novel.

No prizes for guessing whom Bulgakov identified with; although Stalin admired his early work, by the s he was personally banning it. In this pioneering work of British science fiction, the hero is a bumptious American mining engineer who stumbles on a subterranean civilisation. Also present are ray guns, aerial travel and ESP. Ironically, the hero finds utopia too boring.

He is rescued from death by the Princess Zee, who flies him to safety. One of a flurry of novels written by Burgess when he was under the mistaken belief that he had only a short time to live. Set in a dystopian socialist welfare state of the future, the novel fantasises a world without religion. JS Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In one of the first split-screen narratives, Burgess juxtaposes three key 20th-century themes: JJ Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. John Carter, a Confederate veteran turned gold prospector, is hiding from Indians in an Arizona cave when he is mysteriously transported to Mars, known to the locals as Barsoom.

Butler single-handedly brought to the SF genre the concerns of gender politics, racial conflict and slavery. Several of her novels are groundbreaking, but none is more compelling or shocking than Kindred. The hero Higgs finds himself in New Zealand as, for a while, did the chronic misfit Butler.

Does it sound familiar? Higgs escapes by balloon, with the sweetheart he has found there. He ends up keeping his promise, witnessing the French revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath from the perspective of the Italian treetops. In this novel, the domineering old spinster Queenie dies — a relief to those around her. Her niece Alison inherits the house, but soon starts to suspect that the old woman is taking over her eight-year-old daughter Rowan. A paranoid, disturbing masterpiece. Alice, while reading in a meadow, sees a white rabbit rush by, feverishly consulting a watch.

She follows him down a hole Freudian analysis, as elsewhere in the story, is all too easy , where she grows and shrinks in size and encounters creatures mythological, extinct and invented. Morbid jokes and gleeful subversion abound. More donnish in tone, this fantasy follows Alice into a mirror world in which everything is reversed. Her journey is based on chess moves, during the course of which she meets such figures as Humpty Dumpty and the riddling twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee. More challenging intellectually than the first instalment, it explores loneliness, language and the logic of dreams.

The year is — and other times. Fevvers, aerialiste, circus performer and a virgin, claims she was not born, but hatched out of an egg. She has two large and wonderful wings. In fact, she is large and wonderful in every way, from her false eyelashes to her ebullient and astonishing adventures. The journalist Jack Walser comes to interview her and stays to love and wonder, as will every reader of this entirely original extravaganza, which deftly and wittily questions every assumption we make about the lives of men and women on this planet.

The golden age of the American comic book coincided with the outbreak of the second world war and was spearheaded by first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants who installed square-jawed supermen as bulwarks against the forces of evil. It celebrates the transformative power of pop culture, and reveals the harsh truths behind the hyperreal fantasies.

XB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. One of the first major works to present alien arrival as beneficent, it describes the slow process of social transformation when the Overlords come to Earth and guide us to the light. At the centre of all is the terrifying Sunday, a superhuman force of mischief and pandemonium. Two rival magicians flex their new powers, pursuing military glory and power at court, striking a dangerous alliance with the Faerie King, and falling into passionate enmity over the use and meaning of the supernatural.

The book is studded with footnotes both scholarly and comical, layered with literary pastiche, and invents a whole new strain of folklore: This classic by an unjustly neglected writer tells the story of Drove and Pallahaxi-Browneyes on a far-flung alien world which undergoes long periods of summer and gruelling winters lasting some 40 years.

This is just the kind of jargon-free, humane, character-driven novel to convert sceptical readers to science fiction. This is a story about the end of the world, and the general falling-off that precedes it, as year-old Karen loses first her virginity, then consciousness. When she reawakens more than a decade later, the young people she knew and loved have died, become junkies or or simply lost that new-teenager smell.

Wondering what the future holds? That said, the creepiness stays with you, especially the house that keeps stealthily remodelling itself: A curly tail, trotters and a snout are not far off. Joanna Biggs Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future, long past the age of humans. The novel follows Lobey, who as Orpheus embarks on a quest to bring his lover back from the dead. With lush, poetic imagery and the innovative use of mythic archetypes, Delaney brilliantly delineates the human condition. Here California is under-populated and most animals are extinct; citizens keep electric pets instead.

In order to afford a real sheep and so affirm his empathy as a human being, Deckard hunts rogue androids, who lack empathy. As ever with Dick, pathos abounds and with it the inquiry into what is human and what is fake. The Axis has won the second world war. Imperial Japan occupies the west coast of America; more tyrannically, Nazi Germany under Martin Bormann, Hitler having died of syphilis takes over the east coast. The Californian lifestyle adapts well to its oriental master. Germany, although on the brink of space travel and the possessor of vast tracts of Russia, is teetering on collapse.

The novel is multi-plotted, its random progression determined, Dick tells us, by consultation with the Chinese I Ching. And in the character of Isserley — her curiosity, resignation, wonderment and pain — he paints an immensely affecting portrait of how it feels to be irreparably damaged and immeasurably far from home. Determined to extricate himself from an increasingly serious relationship, graduate Nicholas Urfe takes a job as an English teacher on a small Greek island. Walking alone one day, he runs into a wealthy eccentric, Maurice Conchis, who draws him into a succession of elaborate psychological games that involve two beautiful young sisters in reenactments of Greek myths and the Nazi occupation.

Appearing after The Collector, this was actually the first novel that Fowles wrote, and although it quickly became required reading for a generation, he continued to rework it for a decade after publication. Before long, he is embroiled in a battle between ancient and modern deities: The three narrative strands — young lovers in the s, the chaos of thebetweenalcoholics, English civil war and soldiers going native in a Vietnam-tinged Roman Britain — circle around Mow Cop in Cheshire and an ancient axehead found there.

Dipping in and out of time, in blunt, raw dialogue, Garner creates a moving and singular novel. A fast-paced thriller starring a washed-up hacker, a cybernetically enhanced mercenary and an almost omnipotent artificial intelligence, it inspired and informed a slew of films and novels, not least the Matrix trilogy. When the adults finally arrive, childish tears on the beach hint less at relief than fear for the future. When Haldeman returned from Vietnam, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he had suffered, he wrote a story about a pointless conflict that seems as if it will never end.

Known for his intricate short stories and critically acclaimed mountaineering novel Climbers, Harrison cut his teeth on SF. In typical fashion, he writes space opera better than many who write only in the genre. For all its star travel and alien artefacts, scuzzy 25th-century spaceports and drop-out space pilots, Light is actually about twisting three plotlines as near as possible to snapping point.

This is as close as SF gets to literary fiction, and literary fiction gets to SF. Jon Courtenay Grimwood Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Amateur stonemason, waterbed designer, reformed socialist, nudist, militarist and McCarthyite, Heinlein is one of the most interesting and irritating figures in American science fiction. This swinging 60s bestseller working title: The Heretic is typically provocative, with a central character, Mike Smith, who is raised by Martians after the death of his parents and questions every human assumption — about sex, politics, society and spirituality — on his arrival on Earth.

Set on the desert world of Arrakis, this complex novel combines politics, religion, ecology and evolution in the rise to power of Paul Atreides, who becomes a revolutionary leader and a prophet with the ability to foresee and shape the future. Epic in scope, Dune is primarily an adventure story, though Herbert was one of the first genre writers convincingly to tackle the subject of planetary ecology in his depiction of a drought-stricken world. After the Bomb — long, long after — humanity is still huddled in medieval-style stockades, cold, ignorant, superstitious and speaking in degraded English, the patois in which this book is written.

Yet his story is still poignant. This is what happens to Robert Wringhim, who is brought up in the Calvinist belief in predestination. When he encounters a devilish figure known as Gil-Martin, Wringhim is easily tempted into undertaking a campaign to purge the world of the Reprobate — those not selected for salvation. After a series of rapes and murders, and seemingly pursued by demons, Wringhim yields to the ultimate temptation of suicide.

Sexist, racist, snob, Islamophobe … Houellebecq has been called many things, with varying degrees of accuracy. The charge of misanthropy is hard to deny, given his repeated portrayal of humankind as something that has lost its way, perhaps even its right to exist. Atomised — set in the world we know but introduced by a member of the superior species that will supplant us — provides two more examples of our inadequacy in half-brothers Michel and Bruno, an introverted biologist and a sex-addict teacher.

Conflict has been eradicated with the aid of sexual hedonism and the drug Soma; babies are factory-bred in bottles to produce a strict class hierarchy, from alpha to epsilon. It is the year AF After Ford Eventually he recalls that he is an eminent concert pianist, scheduled to perform. The man is shepherded through an expanding and contracting world, his own memories and moods changing like the weather. Yet the dream-logic is rooted in real, poignant, human dilemmas. One for readers who have grown out of Philip K Dick.

CO Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Hill House is haunted, but by what? The ghosts of the past or the people of the present? Here is a delicious, quietly unnerving essay in horror, an examination of what makes us jump. Jackson sets up an old dark house in the country, garnishes it with some creepy servants, and then adds a quartet of intrepid visitors.

novels that everyone must read (according to the guardian) – One Hundred Pages

But her lead character — fragile, lonely Eleanor — is at once victim and villainess. By the end, the person she is scaring most is herself. Are the ghosts that a new governess in a country house believes to be steadily corrupting her young charges apparitions, hallucinations or projections of her own dark urges? The book divides SF critics and puzzles fans of her crime novels, but remains one of the great British dystopias and a trenchant satire on our times and values.

JCG Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In the centre of England, a vast crystalline lake has formed. A strong candidate for the most beautiful of all Victorian novels. Owing debts to Jimi Hendrix and offering a decidedly 60s summer festival vibe, Bold as Love is the first in a series of novels that mix politics with myth, counterculture and dark age sensibilities. It deservedly won Jones the Arthur C Clarke award. On the morning of his 30th birthday, Josef K is arrested by two sinister men in dapper suits. PO Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The story has two central characters.

Algernon is a mouse, whose intelligence is surgically enhanced to the level of rodent genius. The same technique is applied to Charlie Gordon, a mentally subnormal fast-food kitchen hand. The narrative, told by Charlie as his IQ soars, traces the discontents of genius.

Alas, the effects of the surgery are shortlived, and the end of the story finds Charlie back in the kitchen — mentally challenged but, in his way, happy. Being smart is not everything. The hotel is haunted by unexorcised demons from brutal murders committed there years ago. Torrance is possessed and turns, homicidally, on his wife and child. Jack is beyond salvation. The film was brilliantly filmed by Stanley Kubrick in A young married woman, Melanie, scours antiques shops to furnish her new home and comes back with an old chaise-longue, which is perfect apart from an unsightly reddish-brown stain.

She falls asleep on it and wakes up in an unfamiliar house, an unfamiliar time — and an unfamiliar body.

At first she assumes she must be dreaming. But gradually she starts to piece together the story of Milly, the young Victorian woman in the last stages of consumption whom she has apparently become, and the nature of the disgrace she has brought on the household run by her fearsomely stern elder sister. Why does the sight of the doctor make her pulse beat faster? And can she find a way back to her own life? AN Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. This is frequently judged the best ghost story of the Victorian period.

On the sudden death of her father, Maud, an heiress, is left to the care of her Uncle Silas, until she comes of age. Sinister in appearance and villainous by nature, Silas first plans to marry Maud to his oafish son, Dudley who is, it emerges, already married. When this fails, father and son, together with the French governess Madame de la Rougierre, conspire to murder their ward with a spiked hammer. Told by the ingenuous and largely unsuspecting Maud, the narrative builds an impending sense of doom.

Set in a near-future in a disintegrating city, where lawlessness prevails and citizens scratch a living from the debris, this dystopia is the journal of an unnamed middle-class narrator who fosters street-kid Emily and observes the decaying world from her window. Despite the pessimistic premise and the description of civilisation on the brink of collapse, with horror lurking at every turn, the novel is an insightful and humane meditation on the survivability of the species.

The world has entered the Second Enlightenment after the Faith Wars. In the Republic of Scotland, Detective Inspector Adam Ferguson investigates the murders of religious leaders, suspecting atheists but uncovering a plot involving artificial intelligence. Before his current incarnation as a thriller writer specialising in conspiracy theories and psychopathic gore, Marshall Smith wrote forward-thinking sci-fi which combined high-octane angst with humour both noir and surreal. His debut features a bizarre compartmentalised city with different postcodes for the insane, the overachievers, the debauched or simply those with unusual taste in interior design; as well as adventures in the realm of dreams, a deep love of cats and a killer twist.

Robert Neville is the last man standing, the lone survivor in a world overrun by night-crawling vampires. But if history is written by the winners, what does that make Neville: Clearly this was too much for the recent Will Smith movie adaptation, which ran scared of the very element that makes the book unique. Francie Brady is a rambunctious kid in s Ireland.

McCabe leads us on a freewheeling tour of a scattered, shattered consciousness, as Francie grows from wayward child to dangerous adult — nursing his grievances and plotting his revenge. Chances are that old Mrs Nugent has a surprise in store. These two figures are pushing south towards the sea, but the sea is poisoned and provides no comfort. In the end, all they have and, by implication, all the rest of us have is each other. During the Korean war and then the space programme, Yeremin closes down his emotions even as his horizons expand, from the Arctic skies to the moon itself.

The second of his sprawling steampunk fantasies detailing the alternate universe of Bas-Lag follows Armada, a floating pirate city, in its search for a rip in reality. Miller breathes new life into the Gothic antihero with his beautifully written Impac-winning first novel. In an epilogue, a spaceship leaves Earth with a cargo of monks, children and the Leibowitzian relics. The Wandering Jew makes recurrent and enigmatic appearances. Then it hops all the way back down again, resolving each story in turn. These include a camp Ealing-style misadventure, an American thriller and an interview with a clone, all connected by a mysterious comet-shaped tattoo.

Moorcock spills out such varied books that he often feels impossible to nail down, which is probably the point. Mother London, his most literary — it was shortlisted for the Whitbread — shows him at the height of his powers. Having gone to sleep on the London underground, the narrator awakes to find himself in 20th-century Hammersmith. He bathes in the now crystalline Thames and spends a day in what used to be the British Museum, airily discussing life and politics.

He then travels up the river to Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed, going on from there to some idyllic haymaking in Oxford. Sweet Home is a deceptive name for the Kentucky plantation where horrific crimes have been committed, as Beloved is for this shocking and unforgettable account of the human consequences of slavery. Sethe lives in Ohio in the s; she has escaped from slavery, but cannot escape the past, which quite literally haunts her.

It sparks off a page adventure that sees him trapped at the bottom of a well, marked with a strange blue stain and taken on many otherworldly adventures, all in search of his missing wife. Murakami has the Japanese trick of writing about surreal events in a matter-of-fact way, making them all the more disturbing.

Ada or Ardor is part sci-fi romance, part Proustian memoir. It plays out on a fantasy planet, a marriage of contemporary America and pre-revolutionary Russia, and details the love affair of precocious Van Veen and his sister Ada, chasing them from lustful puberty to decrepit old age. It is a gorgeous display of narrative wizardry, at once opulent, erotic, playful and wise. A moving affirmation of the continuities of love against unusual odds. JH Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. But this novel, which won Hugo and Nebula awards, reminds us he was once one of the most exciting names in hard sci-fi.

Part of the Known Space series, it follows a group of humans and aliens as they explore a mysterious ring-shaped environment spinning around a star like a giant hula-hoop. Set in Manchester in the near-future and in a phantasmagorical virtual reality, Vurt is the story of Scribble, his gang the Stash Riders and his attempt to find his sister Desdemona, who is lost in a drug-induced VR. Set in a rural Ireland that is also a vision of hell, it features policemen turning into bicycles; that SF standby, the universal energy source; and any number of scientific and literary in-jokes.

According to Yoruba tradition, a spirit child is one who has made a pact with his fellows in their other, more beautiful world, to rejoin them as soon as possible. Azaro breaks the pact, choosing to remain in this place of suffering and poverty, but the African shanty town where he lives with his parents teems with phantoms, spirits and dreams. An angry, impassioned fantasy of how to take down corporate America, and an ingenious modern version of the myth of the double. Thwarted in love, the hero Scythrop reads The Sorrows of Werther and considers suicide, but settles for the comforts of madeira instead.

Sinister and sensual, overwrought and overwritten, Titus Groan is a guilty pleasure — a dank, dripping Gothic cathedral of a novel. Titus himself is a minor character — literally: He inherits Gormenghast castle and its extraordinary household: But at its heart is a chilling glimpse of the nature of evil. With this gargantuan novel, Powys set out to take a location he knew well from his boyhood and make it the real hero of the story.

It tells the story of Glastonbury through a year of turmoil, setting mystic mayor John Geard against industrialist Philip Crow. Geard wants to turn the town into a centre for Grail worship, while Crow wants to exploit and develop the local tin mines. Complex and rich, this is a landmark fantasy novel.

The novel is as much a study of their obsession as a brilliant examination of magic and rationalism. A Benedictine monk who gave it up to study medicine, Rabelais wrote this satirical tale of the giant Pantagruel and his even more monstrous and grotesque father Gargantua on the cusp between eras.

In his portrayal of Gargantua, a belching, farting scholar given to urinating over the masses below his ivory tower, he satirises medieval learning as well as the emerging Renaissance thirst for knowledge. Remind you of anything more contemporary? NB Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. This was the novel that brought the one-time astrophysicist to the attention of the SF mainstream. What follows is a history of our world with Islam and Buddhism as the dominant religions and the major scientific discoveries and art movements we take for granted happening elsewhere.

Necessarily schematic in places, but a stunning achievement all the same. Every now and then, a book comes along that is so influential you have to read it to be part of the modern world. It is also a truly global phenomenon, and a nice little earner for the tribe of British character actors who have had the good fortune to be cast in the films.

Claire Armitstead Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The offensive core of the novel depicts, under thin disguise, the prophet Muhammad, and wittily if blasphemously questions the revealed truth of the Koran. Stranded in the Sahara, a pilot meets a boy. He claims to have come from an asteroid, which he shared with a talking flower, and to have visited many other worlds — one inhabited only by a king, another by a businessman, a third by a drunkard … On Earth, he has chatted with a snake and tamed a fox. Blindness is black, says an onlooker to the man who has suddenly ceased to see while sitting in his car at the traffic lights; but this blindness is white, a milky sea in the eye.

Soon everyone is affected and the city descends into chaos. His flowing, opaque style can be challenging, but this parable of wilful unseeing, which resists reductive interpretations, is full of insight and poetry. When Lily Bloom dies, she simply moves house: The classic Gothic tale of terror, Frankenstein is above all a novel of ideas. Victor Frankenstein is a young Swiss student who resolves to assemble a body from dead parts and galvanise it into life. As well as an exploration of nature and nurture, the book can be read as a reaction to motherhood and a comment upon creativity.

High SF at its best. The world is gone, destroyed in an accident that gave humanity farcasters, controlled singularities that enable instant travel across galactic distances. The internet is now a hive mind of advanced AIs that control the gates and keep a vast empire in existence. But someone or something is playing with time, and all is not as it seems.

Hyperion won the Hugo award for best novel. Not so much a novel as a treatise on the nature and evolution of intelligence in the universe, Star Maker takes an unnamed Englishman on a tour of space and time as he observes human and alien civilisations rise and fall over a period of one hundred billion years. A short, dense book, it repays several readings.

Fast, furious and containing more ideas in a single sentence than most writers manage in an entire book, Snow Crash has been credited with helping to inspire online worlds such as Second Life and established Stephenson as a cult figure. This classic novel of horrific possession is supposed to have come to the author in a nightmare. It takes the form of a posthumous confession by Dr Henry Jekyll, a successful London physician, who experiments privately with dual personality, devising a drug that releases his depraved other self, Edward Hyde.

The murderous Hyde increasingly dominates the appalled Jekyll, who finally kills himself to escape his double. Others have seen it as a depiction of ineradicable dualisms in the Scottish character. The solicitor Jonathan Harker is sent to Transylvania on property business with Count Dracula and is vampirised by his client an interesting reversal of the normal estate agent-purchaser relationship. The count sails to England and embarks on a reign of bloodsucking terror, before being chased back to his lair by the Dutch vampirologist Dr van Helsing, and decapitated.

He would, of course, rise again. This unusual writer excels at the creation of skewed, dreamlike parallel worlds. In his fourth novel, the rootless, emotionally frozen Martin Blom is blinded by a stray bullet: A new nocturnal existence and highly charged affair with a nightclub waitress follow, in a phantasmagorical meditation on repression and transgression, absence and invisibility.

Hank Morgan, an engineer from 19th-century Connecticut, is knocked out in a crowbar fight and mysteriously transported to sixth-century England. Vonnegut considered Sirens of Titan to be one of his best books , ranking it just below Slaughterhouse-Five. Featuring a dimension-swapping ultra-rich space explorer who can see the future, a robot messenger whose craft is powered by UVTW the Universal Will to Become and the newly established Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, Sirens of Titan manages to be classic 50s pulp, a literary sleight of hand, a cult novel of the 60s counterculture and unmistakably Vonnegut all at the same time.

Young Jakob von Gunten enrols in a sinister academy that touchstone of Germanic fiction in which students learn how to be good servants. Kafka and Hesse were big fans of the Swiss writer; film-making duo the Brothers Quay turned the novel into a mesmerising stock-frame feature in Waters followed the rollicking Tipping the Velvet with this sombre, beautifully achieved meditation on love and loneliness set in the milieu of Victorian spiritualism. Waters exploits the conventions of the ghost story to moving, open-ended effect, recreating a world of fascinating detail and beguiling mystery.

On his return he reports that he has travelled to the year , Mankind has evolved into hyper-decadent Eloi and hyper-proletarian Morlocks, who live underground. The Eloi fritter, elegantly, by day. The Morlocks prey on the Eloi cannibalistically by night. Before returning to his own time, the Time Traveller goes forward to witness the heat death of the Solar System. At the end of the narrative, he embarks on a time journey from which he does not return. The most read, imitated and admired invasion fantasy of the 19th century.

The Martians, a cold-bloodedly cerebral species, driven by the inhospitability of their dying planet and superior technology, invade Earth. Their first cylinders land at Horsell Common and are followed by an army of fighting machines equipped with death rays. Humanity and its civilisation crumple under the assault, which is witnessed by the narrator, a moral philosopher. The novel can be read as an allegory of imperialism. As the narrator muses: The Sword in the Stone was initially published as a stand-alone work, but was subsequently rewritten to become the first part of a tetralogy, The Once and Future King.

Only at the end of the book is it confirmed that the boy will grow up to be King Arthur. Kathryn Hughes Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Originally published in four volumes, this far-future story presents a powerfully evocative portrait of Earth as the sun dies. Using the baroque language of fantasy to tell a story that is solidly science fiction, Wolfe follows Severian, a professional torturer exiled to wander the ruined planet and discover his fate as leader and then messiah for his people.

Complex and challenging, this is perhaps one of the most significant publications in the last three decades of sci-fi. Triffids are possibly escapees from a Soviet laboratory; their takeover begins when a meteor shower blinds everyone who witnesses it. Bill Masen owes his survival to the fact that he was in hospital with his eyes bandaged at the time. CA Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. It emerges, six months later, that every fertile woman in the village is pregnant. As they grow up with terrifying psychic powers, a perceptive Midwich citizen, Gordon Zellaby, contrives to blow them up and save humanity.

What did the Soviet censors find so offensive? Until, that is, the mathematician D falls in love. Bakha, 18, is strong and able-bodied. He is a latrine cleaner, a Dalit, an untouchable, and the novel traces a day in his life. Deep in thought and enjoying a sweet jalebi, Bakha brushes against a Brahmin. A novel written, some would say, before the genre was properly invented. Set in Surinam, which the author may or may not have visited, its hero is a highly cultivated African prince who is brought to the West Indies as a slave.

They marry but, unwilling to have his children raised in servitude, Oroonoko raises a slave rebellion. It is and while the Irish war of independence rages outside the gates of their County Cork home, Sir Richard Naylor and his Anglo-Irish family continue their privileged life of tea and tennis. Afrikaner teacher Ben du Toit lives a comfortable life in s Johannesburg. Yet his family do not want to look and his search for the truth makes him dangerously vulnerable. Nonetheless, Shirley is an important social novel, set in Yorkshire during the Luddite riots at the end of the Napoleonic wars, which revolves around two questions: Paul Laity Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.

Unable to reconcile his religion with his homosexuality, Kenneth Toomey wanders the world from the Paris of Joyce and Pound, via Nazi Germany and heyday Hollywood, to Malta where — mottled, sallow, emaciated — he awaits his death, sure of only one thing: Claire Armistead Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Middle-aged Jeeter Lester is an impoverished cotton farmer.

He married his wife, Ada, at the age of 11 and the couple have had 17 children. Incest rages in the Lester household. Tobacco Road created an image of poor white trash that is still with us. Not so much of an allegory, then, as a Kafkaesque parable Camus acknowledged the debt: Nicholas Lezard Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. His novel is set on Haiti, an island steeped in myth and voodoo. Ti Noel is a slave when a rebellion begins in Having lost his job he moves in with his daughter on her remote farmstead, but then is a helpless bystander when three black men arrive and rape her.

His life is becoming a tuition in humiliation. Yet the bleakness of any paraphrase is belied by the beautiful exactness of the prose, which mimics the intelligence and coldness of the protagonist. But the Magistrate is also a servant of the empire and his intervention in the case of a barbarian girl teaches him lessons about himself as well as the workings of power. Technology with a human face. Only luck rescues her, and makes her penitent. The tale is the more compelling because she is looking back ruefully on her misadventures in older age, examining her own motives with withering candour.

This novel really does attempt an anatomy of post-war America. It also combines the trickery of post-modern narration — a reverse chronology, sudden shifts of narrative perspective, interpolated passages of documentary reconstruction — with a simple and alluring fable. For the spine of this huge book is the story of what happens to a famous object, the baseball hit into the stands to win the World Series for the New York Giants in , just as the Soviet Union is successfully testing an atomic bomb. Attuned like no other novel to the perplexities that hum away at the margins of everyday experience, White Noise remains the most precise, and killingly funny, portrayal of the way we live now.

Lindesay Irvine Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. The titular cities are Paris and London. It is the best and worst of times:

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