 | The Red and the Black (Penguin Classics) by Stendhal
Buy new: £2.94 / Used from: £1.43 The greatest novel ever written (according to Tolstoy)
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 | Anna Karenina (Wordsworth Classics) by L.N. Tolstoy
Buy new: £1.91 / Used from: £0.01 Way too long but contains everything life has to show us
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 | The Idiot (Wordsworth Classics) by F.M. Dostoevsky
Buy new: £1.89 / Used from: £0.15 Prince Myshkin has to be one of the most life-affirming characters in fiction
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 | Old Goriot (Penguin Red Classics) by Honore de Balzac
Buy new: £5.24 / Used from: £1.89 Balzac wrote several other novels as good as this ('Lost Illusions' springs to mind) but a good place to start
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 | Sentimental Education (Penguin Classics) by Gustave Flaubert
Buy new: £1.71 / Used from: £2.50 A portrait of a man and an epoch (Paris in the 1840s)
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 | Pride and Prejudice (Penguin Popular Classics) by Jane Austen
Buy new: £1.80 / Used from: £0.01 No one ever wrote with more wit aside from Stendhal
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 | Wuthering Heights (Penguin Popular Classics) by Emily Bronte
Buy new: £1.80 / Used from: £0.01 Could be the greatest female writer ever
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 | Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (Penguin Classics) by Mary Shelley
Buy new: £1.35 / Used from: £0.30 Maybe the greatest fable ever written. And only 18 years old...
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 | Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Penguin Popular Classics) by Thomas Hardy
Buy new: £1.80 / Used from: £0.01 Will quite probably make you cry
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 | Vanity Fair (Penguin Popular Classics) by William Makepeace Thackeray
Buy new: £1.85 / Used from: £0.01 The least sentimental novel ever written. And beats anything Dickens wrote by a country mile.
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 | Les Miserables (Penguin Popular Classics) by Victor Hugo
Buy new: £1.83 / Used from: £0.01 Difficult to choose between the Russians, the French and the English but French novelists just pip it
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 | Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
Buy new: £6.99 / Used from: £3.75 The only German entry - a story of a family in decline
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 | The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Collector's Library Editions) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Buy new: £16.99 / Used from: £24.01 Once you get the taste for them you read them again and again
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 | Lucien Leuwen (Classics) by Stendhal
Buy used from: £13.61 Yes I know its cheating having Stendhal here twice but this is my personal favourite
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