 | Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder by Evelyn Waugh
Buy new: £6.29 / Used from: £2.59 The classier student's guide to drinking (in a poetic and tragic manner).
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 | A Clockwork Orange (Penguin Modern Classics) by Anthony Burgess
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.94 Moloko & ultra-violence! Absolutely unlike anything else ever written!
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 | The Trial (Penguin Modern Classics) by Franz Kafka
Buy new: £6.69 / Used from: £1.45 This is essentially what my life is like. A bible for the browbeaten clerk and the most terrifying novel ever.
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 | The Master and Margarita (Penguin Modern Classics) by Mikhail Bulgakov
Buy used from: £5.39 Actually, I should have placed this at no. 1! Rollercoaster ride through Moscow with the devil, a naked lady and a giant talking cat. What more can you ask for?
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 | The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £0.51 Riotous! Dangerfield is a truly great (and thoroughly nasty) creation. Especially when getting into fights dressed as a kangaroo in the Soho-ho!
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 | If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage classics) by Italo Calvino
Buy new: £5.59 / Used from: £2.00 Another true original. Everything you have ever thought of doing with a novel, Calvino does here. All the rules are broken. A real box of tricks.
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 | The Picture of Dorian Gray (Penguin Classics) by Oscar Wilde
Buy new: £4.49 / Used from: £1.81 Perhaps the most perfect novel written. It is conjured with pure mystery - all smoke and mirror; opium dens and crooked London alleys. Appropriately, I finished reading this on a stormy Christmas Eve.
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 | The Torture Garden (Empire of the Senses) by Octave Mirbeau
Buy new: £7.59 / Used from: £4.52 WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?! A twisted parable set in the far east! The imagery is so stark and powerful, it lingers like a nightmare. De Sade meets Ballard.
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 | Despair (Penguin Modern Classics) by Vladimir Nabokov
Buy new: £7.14 / Used from: £4.94 It's official! Reading Nabokov adds ten years onto your life! It was between this and 'Laughter in the Dark'. In both the protagonist is tortured to the brink of madness. Perhaps this goes further...
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 | Froth on the Daydream (Quartet Encounters) by Boris Vian
Buy used from: £20.70 ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL. A world where tangible objects stretch to fit the mood of the characters. Achingly beautiful. There is no love story better, nor tragedy worse.
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 | The Vatican Cellars (Twentieth Century Classics) by Andre Gide
Buy used from: £29.67 Anarchic, and not what you would expect. The greatest moment: Lafcadio throwing a man from a train for no reason whatsoever.
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 | Dan Yack (Peter Owen Modern Classic) by Blaise Cendrars
Buy new: £6.56 / Used from: £1.00 Arctic mayhem, and perhaps hellraising for hellraising's sake. Three other characters go mad in different ways as cabin fever sets in.
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 | Le Grand Meaulnes (Penguin Modern Classics) by Henri Alain-Fournier
Buy used from: £11.24 Painfully romantic; a kind of midsummer dream of lost youth. Stumbling across a wedding party in the midst of the woods is spellbinding.
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 | The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
Buy new: £11.89 / Used from: £1.53 How can you possibly get hooked on Jungian pschoanalysis? His obsession with all things baroque and mystic is infectious.
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 | Diary of a Madman (Classics) by N.V. Gogol
Buy used from: £1.75 The eponimous story falls away like the narrator's sanity. The Nose is absolutely hilarious. Gogol was quite literally a maniac.
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 | Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics) by Leo Tolstoy
Buy new: £5.99 / Used from: £2.58 No hyperbole can do it justice. Especially now it has been restored to its original title. I mean: 'ANNA KARENIN'? - a translator getting ideas above her station!
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 | Let it Come Down (Penguin Modern Classics) by Paul Bowles
Buy new: £7.79 / Used from: £7.08 It begins with a downpour and ends in a terrible downfall: no other book has conveyed being so far from home. Absolutely startling
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